Black Rain Falling

by Jacob Ross

  I followed the women up a hill that sloped down to the sea. The grass and shrubs and tombstones were so groomed, the place felt almost cheerful. I’d asked them to show me a plot no less than one and a half years old and no more than three. The grave had to be unadorned.

  Dada cocked her chin for a second as if listening to voices inside her head. ‘Kwesi Jo,’ she said, beckoning as if she were about to introduce a neighbour.

  Once there, I pointed out the difference between a new and a subsided ‘resting place’. I showed them what disturbed soil might look like after a couple of years. Then I took them along the path that we’d just walked up, and pointed out the kinds of plants that would first colonise a disturbed plot of soil. If that patch had lots of plants like those and looked different from the other vegetation around it, I said, they should make a note of the location and call me.

  Benna repaid me by naming every weed I showed them, explaining what illness each was good for.

  ‘How you call that?’ the old woman said.

  ‘Ruderal plants,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘I mean dis kinda knowin you got.’

  ‘Forensics,’ I said.

  ‘What he say?’ Dada enquired.

  ‘Furrin-sick!’ she said.

  I choked back a chuckle.

  ‘What you grinnin at, youngfella?’

  ‘Somebody just came to mind – that’s all. I want to ask a favour, please. Miss Stanislaus not s’pose to know I been here. Just in case, yunno?’

  They nodded like a chorus.

  ‘I need to find Mibo,’ I said.

  A chuckle escaped Dada.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Prob’ly gone fishin,’ Dada said.

  ‘He was around the night Juba got killed?’

  Benna shook her head, ‘Out on de reef divin lambi.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I sure, he sell me some the same day. He even ask me how it happm? I tell im I wasn dere.’ Benna swung her stick in front of her. ‘S’far as I kin see, Mibo is more fisherman dan police. Night and day, he out in the water. He the best boatman we got. Pity he so damn greedy.’ Benna chuckled again. It was all she was prepared to say.

  I left them at the corner where Juba had appeared the night Miss Stanislaus took him down. I remembered the strangeness of that foreday morning, with Juba spread out on the road and the sight of a whole village emerging like shadows in the dawn.

  The station was a concrete cubicle with a backroom added to it. A woman in a blue T-shirt, stamped Don’t stop de Carnival, sat at the front desk, her fingers spread wide, admiring her blood-red nails.

  ‘G’morning, is DC Digson, here,’ I said. ‘I looking for Officer Mibo.’ I opened the door that led to the space and stood with my shoulder against it.

  She blinked, ran dark appraising eyes up and down my body, then looked me in the face.

  ‘Officer who?’

  ‘Mibo! He around?’

  She shook her head – those heavily mascaraed eyes took me in again. She became suddenly alert. ‘You the officer name Digger, not so? Y’all the ones that—’ She stopped short.

  ‘Shoot down Juba, is what you want to say? In self-defence? Is why I here to see Officer Mibo. What’s your name?’

  ‘Shirley. I’z Admin. Officer Mibo lef about one hour ago. He chasing a case.’

  ‘Where?’

  Shirley gestured past my head. ‘Other side ov the islan.’

  ‘Look me in my face and tell me that, Miss Shirley.’

  She lowered her head.

  ‘I take it that you know his personal cell phone number?’ I pointed at the notepad at her elbow and pushed the biro on the desk towards her.

  ‘Hold on.’ She retreated to the back room. I heard the clack of a receiver being lifted, a series of rapid taps. I shouldered the door and entered the tiny room. The woman’s head shot up. She recradled the handset. Her shoulders had gone rigid – her expression hostile.

  ‘What you don’t want me to hear, Miss Shirley?’ I said. ‘Is clear to me you two got something going on. Tell me I lie.’ I looked her in the face. She looked away.

  ‘I got the work phone number but he’s not been answering. What’s his personal cellphone number?’

  ‘Is private,’ she said. ‘I not s’pose to—’

  ‘Tell Officer Mibo I want to talk to him urgent. Is important. I want him to admit that his statement about me and Miss Stanislaus was hearsay. Tell him if he don’t contact me, I’ll come back. He got my number, but I giving it again, so he don’t claim he lost it.’ I strode over to the front desk, took a sheet of paper and scribbled my cell number. I tossed the sheet on the desk.

  I left her at the entrance, her arms folded tight against her chest. I felt the woman’s eyes on my back.

  22

  I picked up Dessie at the high white gates of her parents’ house. I loved watching her appear at the top of the winding concrete road that led up to their old plantation house, its white walls just visible among the royal palms and cedar trees that stood over the building.

  She dangled a canvas bag in one hand, wore brown soft leather shoes and a simply cut light blue shoulder-strapped dress that shivered around her shape with every step.

  ‘What you looking at?’ she said.

  ‘Possibilities,’ I said and smiled as she dropped herself on the seat and nudged me with an elbow.

  We took the long road to the beach, up through the Morne Bijoux Hills lined with the gabled mansions of old families who believed they still owned the island. Dessie knew every one of them. Those long arms of hers were always out the window, waving at people suspended in multicoloured hammocks or stretched out like hospital patients in chaise lounges on oversized verandas.

  When we got to Coburn Valley we switched roles, with me shouting out to old fellas on donkeys, children with bundles of firewood on their heads or shirtless youths leaning against anything that would support their poor-arse, coolvibes poses.

  Grand Beach was overrun with children and harassed hotel staff serving overdressed cocktails – hibiscus flowers and all – to tourists roasting oiled bodies under a spiteful sun.

  Dessie rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth.

  ‘Is Sunday,’ I reminded her. ‘And we got a tourist liner out there.’ I raised my chin at the fat white boat sitting like a slug on the water in the distance, just outside San Andrews Harbour.

  ‘No privacy here.’ She broke out in a chuckle, dropped an arm across my shoulder and placed her full weight on me.

  ‘We got some of what you want down the other end. C’mon, water wasting.’

  We strolled the half-mile down to the northern end of the beach. The sand was darker there, the water rougher. A place the local children loved because they could launch themselves naked into the shallows from the giant granite rock that sprouted from the water.

  The tourists never went beyond the white sand, not even the occasional dog that pranced around their legs.

  We dropped ourselves on the sand.

  A couple hundred yards beyond the shallows, two speed boats were cleaving the water back and forth, with skiers strung behind them. Dessie couldn’t keep her eyes off the faster boat. She would drop her head, begin digging the sand with her fingers then look up abruptly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. She had her arms around her knees now, which she’d pulled up to her chin, her chest pressed against them. Had it not been for the heat of the day, I would have thought she was feeling cold.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to be here, Digger. Let’s go.’ She rose, took up the towel she’d been sitting on, shook it and folded it quickly, then stuffed it in her bag. ‘C’mon, Digger!’ She grabbed my hand.

  ‘Hold on, Dessie! Tell me what going on with you!’ Then I saw the distress on her face and relented.

  We were halfway along the beach and just about to head towards the car when one of the speedboats swerved towards the beach, its engine gr
owling. It cut off abruptly. I turned when I heard the heavy splash of water and followed the pale shape of the swimmer underwater until it emerged: a big head crowned with tight black curls, a broad pale face, a bristle of dark brown hairs on the man’s chest and arms. Dessie’s husband – Luther Caine.

  Luther’s eyes were on her – grey-green, steady – his mouth clamped down like a pot lid.

  ‘Come on!’ Dessie grabbed my wrist.

  ‘Get in the car.’ I shook off her grip, tossed the keys at her and turned around to face the man. Luther’s eyes remained on Dessie. He looked as if he’d been wrestling sharks: two red welts streaked down his left shoulder and arm. Purpling skin just under his ear. He raised his right hand. A youngfella came sprinting over the sand towards him. Luther Caine swung an arm at the boat and the youth plunged into the water, climbed aboard and sat with his hand on the steering.

  Luther Caine turned abruptly and strode along the edges of the water, the muscles writhing beneath the skin of his back and legs. It was as if he hadn’t seen me – as if I wasn’t there.

  Back in the car with Dessie, I sat with my head pressed against the headrest. I rolled my head towards her. ‘Next time, Dessie, you don’t run from Luther – you unnerstand? Because every time you run, it is a win for him.’

  ‘Your face, Digger! When you turned round to look at him. Jesus! You promise me one thing, Digger: you’ll never look at me like that.’

  ‘Like?’

  She gave me an odd searching look, then frowned. ‘Like – like you were ready to kill, Digger. Like – Jesus! I’ve never seen that side of you before.’

  ‘Why Luther still wants to control you, Dessie?’

  She shrugged, folded her arms around her shoulders. ‘He thinks I know all about his fuckin shady dealings. You’re a policeman and I’m with you, so!’

  ‘Tell me about his dealings.’

  She shook herself and straightened up. ‘I don’t want to talk about Luther any more. I hate that man.’

  Dessie looked deflated, somehow reduced. I’d seen Malan intimidating women he’d been with just by turning his gaze on them. I’d seen them grow fidgety and uncertain in his presence, especially when they were with another man. But it was never as bad as the effect that Luther seemed to have on Dessie.

  ‘Belt up, Dessie. I taking you on a rumshop-run,’ I said.

  It was my way of trying to salvage what was a spoilt Sunday afternoon. I wanted to make Dessie feel good about herself again. I did that sometimes – take her on a trip along the East Coast Road of the island, which was lined with drinking holes, always filled with men slapping dice or arguing over games of rummy. Stepping into those rickety joints with Dessie nourished something in her. Charred old men, in their half-drunk stupor, would stare at this bottle-smooth, fine-boned creature as if she were an apparition and the more drunk they were, the more rapturous their gazes. She would bless them with her smile while I coughed up the money to buy bottles of drink – an excuse for entering the rumshop in the first case.

  By the time I got back, the boot of my little Datsun was sagging with Camaho lager and Malta that I had no use for.

  In bed, Dessie looked into my face. ‘I didn’t think you loved me that much, Digger.’

  ‘What you talking bout, Dessie?’

  ‘Luther, the beach . . . ’

  ‘That’s what you call love?’

  ‘It will do,’ she chuckled.

  ‘Tell me about Luther’s shady dealings.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, rolled away and turned her back towards me.

  23

  Lazar Wilkinson’s mother was a dark-skinned wood-knot of a woman. Dora Wilkinson sniffed at Miss Stanislaus’s words of condolence, barely looking at us. From time to time she threw darting, underhand glances in our direction with eyes the colour and sheen of soursop seeds. Miss Stanislaus kept fluttering her tissue and patting her forehead, distracted, it seemed, by a crippling sadness for the woman’s loss.

  I wasn’t fooled. Miss Stanislaus’s eyes were taking in the kitchen, the new concrete pillars, the pictures of Mary and Joseph and Jesus of the Bleeding Heart on the wall facing the half-opened doorway.

  ‘Your loving son – he use to live with you?’ Miss Stanislaus said.

  The woman fanned her face and nodded.

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Sometimes Lazar spend a night or two with one of his little wimmen, but his home is right here.’

  ‘What work he do?’ Miss Stanislaus’s tissue went still.

  Miss Dora twisted her mouth, lifted her shoulders and dropped them. ‘As far as I concern Lazar is a good boy. He never rude to me and he help me out.’

  Miss Stanislaus blinked at her and smiled. ‘Yes, I sure you feel so. What work he do?’

  ‘Work is work. I don’t bother about that.’

  ‘An the work that you don’t bother about, what work it is?’

  The woman cleared her throat. ‘I never ask him and he never tell me, Miss Lady. All I know is nobody got no right to do that to my boy.’

  ‘I agree,’ Miss Stanislaus said. ‘Sorry to upset you more. Missa Digger and me going right now.’

  Back on the public road, Miss Stanislaus stuffed her tissue up her sleeve. ‘Missa Digger, make sure you bring me back to see that woman . . . in . . . lemme see . . . two weeks’ time . . . mebbe less.’

  ‘You onto something?’

  ‘Is only a feeling I got right now. That’s all.’

  I dropped her off in San Andrews market square and went off to do some shopping before returning to Beau Séjour.

  I left my vehicle by the little bridge that marked the entrance to Beau Séjour village and turned into a stony path off the main road. I followed it past half-dead mango trees and wilting hibiscus hedges all the way up to a small house near the top of the hill.

  The residences I passed were at various stages of improvement. Wooden walls were being replaced with concrete breeze blocks. There were unpainted verandas here and there and doorways decorated with fluttering, multicoloured strip curtains.

  Jana Ray’s two-room shack stood some way above them, its unpainted board walls blackened by seasons of sun and rain. A high bamboo clump curved over the tiny building like a second roof.

  A small garden at the front, with limp okra plants and a couple of tomato vines held up by sticks of bamboo dug into the soil.

  As if in defiance of all that barrenness, a banana tree flourished – its silver-green leaves broad and ponderous with health.

  I followed the slabs of stone dug into the earth to the rear of the house.

  A length of electric wire bellied down from the eaves, anchored at the other end by a nail driven into the bark of an ant-blighted grapefruit tree. A pair of shorts and a T-shirt hung from it. All that remained of the steps was a dangerouslooking wood-stake in the earth.

  I unwound the strip of cloth that held the door closed and shouldered it open. I stood at the doorway and surveyed the front room: a large lunar calendar with a poster of Bob Marley above it. To the left of that a black-and-white photo of a pensive-looking Malcolm X.

  A small dresser built from an assortment of board cuttings on which sat two spoons, a kitchen knife, an enamel cup, two plates – washed and laid one on top of the other; five fingers of green bananas, a half-empty paper bag of flour, a beer bottle filled with cooking oil. A tin of condensed milk sat like a small island in a plastic bowl of water. The surface was thick with drowning ants trying to get at the sweetness.

  Books lay stacked on the floor: school texts in one corner, a heap of big hardbacks in another. In the floor space between them, a neat array of Louis L’Amour Westerns, a couple of novels by Earl Lovelace, an assortment of Marvel comics, a book of poetry by one Vladimir Lucien, a Caribbean romance by Nailah Imoja, the folk poetry of Paul Keens-Douglas and Louise Bennett.

  I dropped the two bags I’d brought with me beside the school books and sat on the floor. I paged through the big books – every one of them wit
h a school library stamp in it. I laid them back exactly as I’d found them.

  I dropped the shopping bags I’d brought at the entrance of what I assumed was the bedroom, dug into my pocket and slipped two hundred-dollar notes between the pages of the heaviest book.

  I tore a page from my pad and scribbled:

  Stay in school – that’s thanks enough.

  Hope they fit.

  Digger

  PS: Look up Histology . . .

  I’d gone to the big Syrian store in San Andrews and spent a good two hours arguing and joking with the owner over prices. I left his counter with four cotton shirts, a stack of shorts and underwear, two pairs of patent leather shoes, a pair of decent trainers and enough T-shirts to last Jana Ray a year. I’d sweet-talked the Syrian into throwing in the toiletries for free by peppering everything I said with Insha ‘a’ Allah. I’d stepped out into the sizzling afternoon with two large shopping bags, very pleased with myself.

  I pulled Jana Ray’s door behind me, retied it and headed back to the road.

  24

  Miss Stanislaus was in a fever to get on with the investigation of Lazar Wilkinson’s murder. There were moments when her urgency turned to panic, though she tried to hide it. It was all I could do to assure her that we still had another fifteen days – enough time to get a breakthrough before the hearing.

  I told her that the woman we were looking for – the one I’d seen on the beach at The Flare with the two suspected men – was probably from one of the villages on the coast. ‘Why so?’ she asked.

  ‘Is the way she walked into the water to climb onto the lil dinghy, and how she sat on the prow of the boat. Like it was no big deal. She’s accustomed to boats and the sea.’

  Miss Stanislaus frowned. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘It take practice and experience to sit on the prow of a rocking boat in rough water without holding on, not so? I can’t imagine a pusson who not from the seaside riding a boat so comfortable.’

  ‘Mebbe,’ Miss Stanislaus said.

  ‘Is all we got to go on,’ I said.

  I’d gone into San Andrews Central and sent out a description of the young woman and the two men I’d seen her with, to every police station on the island, including Kara Island. No sightings, they said. And that was puzzling because even the bushes of Camaho had eyes and ears.