Black Rain Falling

by Jacob Ross

  ‘You not telling me what the problem is, Sir.’

  ‘You not giving me a chance, Digson.’ I waited through the pause, imagined Chilman licking those leather-purse lips of his.

  ‘Kathleen disappear,’ he said.

  ‘Miss Stanislaus! Disappear, you say?’ Even as I spoke, I felt the sinking sensation in my guts.

  ‘I can’t find the woman. She left her girlchild on her own. Daphne call’ me, upset. Say she frighten. But my granddaughter refuse to tell me where her mother gone. Digson! I got a good idea what she about to do.’

  His voice retreated down his throat and then he hung up.

  I didn’t have the courage to call Dessie and cancel. I sent her a text message.

  I had more than a good idea of what Miss Stanislaus was about to do. In Kathy’s Kitchen she’d told me. I hadn’t wanted to believe her.

  I grabbed my keys and stepped out into the night. A fingernail of a moon hung over Old Hope valley.

  I stood for a while eyeing my little Toyota, polished to a shine by two youngfellas I’d paid to do the job earlier in the evening. I spooled through a string of dirty names for Chilman in my head, hurried into the vehicle and kept my foot on the accelerator.

  I’d broken out in a sweat by the time I reached the Western Main Road, my radio turned down low, the rumble of my tyres layering the dread that had crept into my head.

  The office was lit up. Chilman’s beat-up Datsun sat in the middle of the concrete courtyard. He was at my desk, his head cocked towards the ceiling.

  He took in my new Adidas NMD trainers, then the rest of me. ‘You rescheduled the encounter?’

  I slid a glance at his hands – my only way of reading him. His thumb was making circles around his index as if testing the texture of the air. Disturbance. Deep.

  Chilman pushed aside the sheet of paper he’d placed under his elbow. ‘Where’s your piece?’

  ‘I left home soonz you called me.’

  His dry-bone hand convulsed. ‘Poor excuse is no excuse, Digson. Not wearing your gun going to kill you one day.’

  ‘What’s up, Sir?’

  ‘You know what’s up.’ He was rubbing his face and shaking his head. ‘However justified my daughter feel, it is still goin to be murder. And that’s the end of all my hard work.’ His gesture took in the office.

  ‘You telling me what I know, Sir. She might’ve gone somewhere else, though.’

  ‘Like where?’ He rested those evil eyes on me. ‘You left your brain at home too? You two work together, how come you didn see it coming?’

  I swallowed back the irritation. ‘Mebbe I did. What about you, Sir?’

  I held his gaze, doing nothing to hide what I was thinking.

  Where the hell wuz you when Juba Hurst dragged your daughter off the road and plant his seed in her? And in all these years, what you done about it? So why you so fuckin surprised she gone off now to shoot down the fella who damaged her?

  ‘All I asking is why you so sure is Kara Island she gone to, Sir.’

  Chilman dismissed my question with a flick of his hand. He slid the sheet of paper towards me. ‘You not the only fella I call up tonight. I speak to Officer Mibo on Kara Island.’

  ‘What Officer Mibo say?’ I visualised a tall officer, twigthin with a shy, pleasant voice. I’d never known Mibo to make an arrest. As Chilman put it, Kara Island didn’t work that way. People were punished and rewarded as the islanders saw fit and there was nothing Camaho law could do about it. Mibo was meant to police the marijuana trade between Vincen Island and Kara Island. That meant doing nothing until one of their young men became too ambitious and ventured into the waters of the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. When they got caught, Mibo called Chilman for help and advice on how to rescue their ‘citizen’. Chilman passed the paperwork to me.

  ‘Mibo confirm that Juba Hurst work on one of them interisland cargo boats name Retribution.’ A chuckle rattled out of him. ‘Boat come in every Sunday and Thursday from Vincen Island. It drop anchor any time between eight and nine in the morning, depending on the tide.’

  ‘You tell Mibo what the issue is?’

  ‘Why?’

  I tried to imagine Officer Mibo attempting to stop Miss Stanislaus from doing anything, and promptly understood Chilman’s cynicism.

  DS Chilman tapped the paper. ‘According to what lil Daphne didn say, I got reason to believe she left this evening with the last ferryboat. The Osprey.’

  I turned to face him. ‘Osprey leave Kara Island nine thirty in the evening. Ain got no other ferry after that. That mean she’s spending Sunday night on Kara Island? What about Daphne?’

  ‘Daphne say she going to be awright. Is all she say.’ Chilman’s thumb made a fast circle against his index. ‘Digson, I bet all the money I don’t have that tomorrow morning, Katheen going to be on the jetty, waiting for that boat to dock. I don’t give a damn how well you two get on. I don’t care less if she’s my own daughter. Like I say, if she kill dat fella, is murder plain and simple, with enough witnesses on that jetty to fill up ten court house. I ordering you to arrest ’er and bring ’er back. At least people will see we done somefing about it.’

  ‘And then?’ I said.

  ‘What you think?’

  ‘I not thinking now, Sir. Is answers I asking for.’

  He jabbed a finger at the paper. ‘You got work to do. Fastest way to get there is by that lil mosquito they call a plane. Problem is, it leave seven forty-five morning-time. It take twenty-five minutes to get there. That mean you reach—’

  ‘Ten past eight,’ I said. I looked him in the eyes. ‘Airport to jetty is just under a mile. Might be too late.’

  DS Chilman looked as if he wanted to cry. The old fella stood up and dragged open Malan’s drawer. He reached inside it, withdrew a pair of plasticuffs and tossed them at me. They struck me on the chest and fell to the floor. ‘Bring her back in them if you have to.’ The gesture seemed to exhaust him. He pushed himself off the chair and shuffled to the door. ‘Sorry to call you out like this, youngfella. But, s’far as I kin see, you the only man on dis fuckin island could lay a hand on my daughter and get away with it. Is why I got to send you. Go catch some sleep.’

  My watch said 3.52am. ‘I leave from here,’ I told him. ‘Night almost done.’

  ‘And your piece?’

  ‘I’ll take the Glock from the storeroom.’

  He grumbled and jangled his keys.

  With my back to him, I heard the brush of his skin on the door handle. ‘Call me,’ he said. It sounded like a threat.

  Chilman closed the door so softly I barely heard the lock engage.

  I waited until the old Datsun grated to a start, watched it shudder out of the concrete courtyard onto the road, loud enough to wake the parish dead.

  I took up the cuffs, stuffed them in my pocket then strode over to Miss Stanislaus’s desk. I ran a hand through every drawer. Chilman would have done this, but I felt I knew his daughter better than him.

  A packet of unopened tissues, a nail file still in its packaging, two neatly ordered piles of multicoloured rubber bands and paper clips, five pencils, their tips honed down to needle-points. The very faint odour of Miss Stanislaus’s perfume.

  Working alongside Miss Stanislaus, I’d learned one important thing from her: people’s actions were driven by what they most wanted to protect or destroy. This polite, soft-voiced woman with a preference for bright handbags, pretty hats and dresses would be no different.

  I went over to the small storeroom at the back of Malan’s office, stepped over the black tin trunk in which we kept the Department’s M24 Sniper Weapon System rifle along with a couple of F2000 patrol shooters. I brought down seven boxes from the top shelf. They contained shells for Miss Stanislaus’s Ruger LCR. I handed them out to staff the way a doctor dispensed opiates. I recorded everything.

  The five cartons of .38 Special +P bullets were exactly as I’d left them, but the hollow point Spear Gold Specials had been br
oken into. Four rounds missing, along with a couple of moon-clip speed-loaders.

  I remembered explaining to Miss Stanislaus the difference between a full-metal-jacket bullet and a hollow point, and why Malan should never have ordered the hollow points. ‘A standard bullet will drill a hole through you,’ I said. ‘A hollow point will make porridge of your insides.’

  I spent twenty minutes pulling aside the cartons and boxes on the shelf until I had to accept that the Glock was missing.

  I retrieved two rounds of standard bullets for Miss Stanislaus’s Ruger, filled up a couple of speed-loaders, repacked the shelf and returned to my desk. The office clock said 4.57.

  My thoughts turned to Daphne. I wasn’t surprised that Chilman couldn’t get a word out of his granddaughter. Lil Miss Daphne Stanislaus would just as readily kill for her mother as die for her. When she was away or working late, Miss Stanislaus left her child with Iona – one of her Fire Baptist friends. I wondered why she didn’t this time. Still, I had no doubt that Daphne would be sitting up this time-a-morning, her cellphone in her hand, waiting to hear from her mother. Daphne never lied, she got that from Miss Stanislaus too.

  I tapped out a message: Digger here, Daph. Where’s Mam?

  No reply.

  U there?

  My phone vibrated, Yh.

  Want 2 talk?

  No.

  She tell u where she gone?

  Yh.

  Kara Island?

  No reply.

  She tell u why she gone?

  No.

  You kno how to use it?

  ?

  The gun.

  ?

  The gun. Black, small. 43 Austria 9x19 marked on left side.

  It took a while before she answered. Yh.

  U sure?

  Yh.

  U at Iona house 2morow?

  Yh.

  NOBODY 2 kno u got d gun EVER! K?

  K.

  Take care.

  U2.

  I pocketed my phone; felt a headache coming on.

  6

  I left the office at 7.15am. It would take me less than twenty minutes to get to the airport – ten minutes before boarding. San Andrews town was now heaving with traffic. I took the West Coast Road to Salt Point. On my right the Atlantic was almost black with the threat of rain. It began hammering down when I got to the airport. Through the wire fence, I spotted the five-seater Cessna at the far corner of the runway.

  I parked in the tiny square of concrete marked out for the police, raised my ID at one of the fellas in Immigration who looked asleep on his feet.

  He rolled his eyes in the direction of the aircraft. ‘Weather no good, Digger. Careful you don’t fall out.’

  I didn’t mind flying, but not in a tin-can pretending to be a plane, with a pair of propellers that made me think of the battery-operated fans tourists held up to their faces to cool themselves. The American owners called it the Island Shuttle. Kara Islanders who preferred the truth to marketing hype, nicknamed it the Flyin Turtle.

  The aircraft shuddered north, dipping like a drunken insect. I sat behind the pilot, my nose a couple of inches from his ear, my seat belt pulled tight against my stomach, my shoulders so tense, they ached. A couple hundred feet below, the sea had gone white in the driving rain.

  Twenty minutes later, Kara Island loomed ahead, its approach pockmarked by dripping rock-islands we called the Family.

  A teacher told us once that these were the most dangerous waters in the world, forget the Bay of Biscay and the Irminger Sea.

  With wind speeds reaching one hundred miles per hour on an ordinary day, rip tides ran like rivers just under the surface, provoked by a dozing twin-headed volcano that Kara Islanders named Kick em Jenny and Kick em Jack. And to add an extra bit of spite to the danger down there, a plate of granite someone had named Devil Tooth lay beneath the boiling waters. Every now and then it made the news by splitting the hull of a careless boat. They never found survivors.

  Someone had come up with a word for all that violence below us: Blackwater.

  With the squall behind, the air-insect I sat in entered another climate: bald sandstone hills, more grass than trees, everything below me biscuit-dry. The little plane battled with the updrafts as it took unsteady aim at the narrow strip of asphalt less than fifty yards from the ocean.

  From up here, Garveyhale, the tiny town, looked like a stack of seashells with the ocean chewing at its edges. The long wooden jetty shot out from its centre like a fossilised proboscis. It was crawling with people.

  The cause of the commotion was no doubt the fat-bellied schooner about two hundred yards or so out in the water, belching a column of black smoke. My watch said 8.25.

  The wheels of the plane hopscotched on the tarmac for a minute, then juddered to a halt. I’d already unbuckled and was crouched in my seat. I muttered ‘Thanks, Man’ in the pilot’s ear as he released the trapdoor and I squeezed out.

  I hit the asphalt running, upped my pace on the narrow coastal road, with nothing between me and the ocean but a hedge of wilting manchineel. The morning had already begun to heat up. Rivulets of sweat ran down my throat. Even from this distance I could hear the engine of the big steel boat drumming the air.

  Between gaps in the trees, I caught glimpses of the rusting hull already beginning its ponderous sidling towards the jetty.

  The crowd of milling bodies came up in the distance. I lengthened my stride.

  The boat had finished docking when I got there gasping, my shirt plastered against my skin. It looked as if all of Kara Island had turned out. People were prodding sacks, inspecting sealed containers winched down to them by three seamen, so muscular they looked corrugated in the hot morning light.

  I swept the crowd from front to back, then more slowly in the spiral pattern I’d picked up in my forensics course in England. I felt my shoulders relax. I pulled out my phone to call Chilman and inform him that we’d got it wrong.

  But then I sensed a change in the crowd. The voices around me quietened. Now I could hear the slap of water against the hull of the boat. I followed people’s gazes and saw why. An apparition – the biggest human I’d ever seen – emerged from somewhere in the hold of the boat.

  He stood on the deck looking down on us, a huge gaff in his hand. Deep-set eyes buried in the broad slab of his face.

  Juba Hurst!

  I’d met him once before, a couple of years ago, on that same jetty. I’d travelled to Kara Island to unravel the mystery of Miss Stanislaus who, almost as soon as Chilman had thrust the woman on San Andrews CID, was accused of laying low a child-abusing preacher named Bello, who turned out to be a close friend of the Justice Minister.

  Looking up at Juba, the big head turning as if it sat on ball bearings, my mind returned to a night of chafing seas when I stood at the end of that same jetty with his hulking body in front of me. He would not let me go past him until I explained what I was doing there. I realised I’d come too close to something he was protecting in one of the boats in the bay. A crewman in a nearby schooner had heard my raised voice. He’d looked out and seen the big man facing me with the weapon in his hand and had alerted the others. I had no doubt that they’d saved my life.

  Juba took his time coming down the gangway, his canvas boots vibrating the green-heart planks of the jetty, the big hook in his hand so polished it looked like glass. I moved back with the crowd, feeling the same dread I’d experienced the first time I met him – that I was in the presence of something not quite human, a creature from my grandmother’s story-world of fire-rolling demons and blood-guzzling loup garou that she used to frighten me with as a child.

  And he stank. The smell of rotting fish and rancid diesel oil came off him like a spreading shadow. It was all I could do to keep myself from retching.

  And this, I thought, was the man that had laid his hands on Miss Stanislaus – just fourteen then – and forced a child on her. No fuckin wonder she wanted him dead.

  I backed away, my mind
on making the call I promised Chilman.

  From the edge of my vision I caught a movement, a little eddy of heads and shoulders. I swung round and there she was, her hair tied back with a grey square of cloth, the morning sun glossing that smooth round face of hers, her chin raised, lips pouted as if she were kissing the air, trickles of sweat running down her neck. She was in a loose man’s shirt, its sleeves rolled up and buttoned at the elbow, her right hand just above the mouth of her handbag.

  I lowered my shoulders, began pushing my way past limbs and torsos towards Miss Stanislaus. A snakepit of hisses and cuss-words assaulted my ears as I elbowed my way through. I surfaced a couple of bodies behind her, then began edging forward.

  And now it was as if the whole tide of bodies around us receded and left Miss Stanislaus facing Juba Hurst. She dipped into the small handbag with that same daintiness I was accustomed to by now. Juba spotted her and halted, his face so shadowed by the hard morning light I could barely pick out his features. I was less than a foot behind her when she raised the gun.

  Perhaps something in me wanted to see whether she would really bring down a man in cold blood in the presence of all these people. Maybe it was because I too wanted this fella dead. Dunno!

  I followed the rise of the gun barrel, her levelling it, the small pause before she slipped her index inside the trigger guard, the tensing of the tendons against her skin, then I shot my hand up under hers and snapped the muzzle skyward. The pistol barked. I heard gasps and squawks, then the fast shuffle of feet, followed by a stampede. I pulled her back hard against my chest, wrestling the pistol from her grip. A sharp, distressed sound came out of her. Her left elbow slammed into my gut. I gasped and pushed myself backward, but she’d already rammed her shoulders into me, her heels digging into the toes of my shoe. I swung her around to face me, heard my own voice grating. ‘Miss Stanislaus, what the fuck yuh think yuh doing! Eh?’

  I was counting on my language to snap her out of it. It did. She froze, her mouth partly open, her eyes bright with disbelief.

  I made a show of unlocking the cylinder and tilting the cartridges into my hand. I was about to pocket the gun when she made a lunge for it, her eyes somewhere beyond my shoulders. I swung around and saw Juba bearing down on us, the big steel hook angled stiffly from his side. He was almost upon us by the time I retrieved a packed loader, slammed it into the pistol and raised the gun at his head.