by Jacob Ross
‘So what you saying?’ I said.
‘Is not me saying, Digger. Is him. S’far as I see, de MJ got to get an argument for cabinet. So give him de argument. Prove that Juba is de murderer that y’all say he is.’
‘I confused,’ I said.
‘Your problem,’ Malan said. ‘And I decide that I not helpin y’all.’
I wasn’t angry with him any more. What I felt about Malan was worse. He’d lost my trust and whatever respect I had for him. He was a danger to himself.
‘I been thinking, Malan – even if it did happen like the MJ believe – mebbe every girlchile in Camaho should be like that, yunno. After a fella two-three-four times her age rape her, she don’t bother to report it. She hold it in until it turn poison in her heart. She bide her time, and when time reach she take him down herself.’
‘You should hear yourself, Digger, you talk like a fuckin criminal.’
‘I learning from you,’ I said. ‘You coming or you going?’
‘I going,’ he said. ‘Fings change in there, not so?’ He raised a hand at the office.
‘You not running the place no more.’
‘Nuffing change, then. You givin me a key?’
‘You not working here no more.’
I remembered DS Chilman’s advice. I fished out my key and handed it to Malan. He plucked it from my fingers. ‘Call me when you want me.’
He ambled to his car, dragged open the door and slid in behind the wheel. Malan drove off without looking back.
Miss Stanislaus was stepping out the door when I turned around. ‘Missa Digger, I see you give that man a key. I not goin to be sittin down in there lissenin to him no more.’
‘Me neither, Miss Stanislaus.’
‘Then you shouldn’ve give him no key.’
‘Your father said to treat him same way.’
‘For what, Missa Digger? For what? He don’t mean nobody no good. Why you still holdin onto him when he nearly got you kill?’
‘Miss Stanislaus—’
‘He nearly got you kill, an you never tell me about it. Why you didn’ tell me?’
I shrugged. ‘I handled it, Miss Stanislaus.’
‘Malan is trouble, he’s trouble to his own self.’ Her words came fierce and urgent. ‘I tell you this, Missa Digger, if anyfing did happen to you down there in that Rock place – I’d’ve been in a lot more trouble becuz is not them police fellas I’d ha been going after. Is him!’
She swung around and quick-stepped past me to the road.
I got into my car, drove until I drew up alongside her. I stopped, leaned across and opened the door.
She kept on walking, her head straight. I did it again a couple of times. ‘We need to talk,’ I said.
She sucked her teeth, threw me a fire-and-brimstone look and kept on walking.
I watched her disappear down the road to the marketplace. I felt so abandoned I decided to go home.
On my way back to my place, I was forced to a crawl on Old Hope Road. Both sides of the road were lined with young children and teenagers. They assaulted my ears with distorted versions of my name: Dig-dug! Dig-who? Digger who Dug her! I put it down to the spillover violence from a cricket match they were playing on the only straight bit of road in the village. Old Hope versus Mont Airy.
I was shaking with exhaustion when I finally pushed open my door. I mixed myself a mauby drink with a sprinkling of rhum agricole and fed my player Third World’s Journey to Addis. I selected ‘Fret not Thyself’. The words were biblical and assuring and loaded with so much history it turned my mind to the old women of Kara Island.
That heaviness in my chest returned – that lump in my throat I could not get rid of and the embarrassment of being close to tears every time I paused, which was why I could not allow myself to stop.
He remind you of yourself. Miss Stanislaus had said that about Jana Ray after she’d gotten over the fact that I did not arrest the youngfella the first time I cornered him in Beau Séjour. It didn’t occur to me until she said it, and even then I decided she was wrong. Jana Ray brought home to me what I didn’t have enough of – family.
I’d taken a picture of him when we were on Dog Island.
The youngfella was standing with his back against the sea, his blue bum-bag dangling from his hand – a tall, sleek-looking man-boy, proud and poor-arse like I used to be. Jana Ray hid his intelligence behind that shy reserve of his. An athlete too, if ever there was one, and in whom the gift was not so much wasted as ignored. I recalled him glaring at me and pointing at his head that last time he visited my place. I have plans, Missa Digger. Gimme a couple more years and I off to university. University meant money. A lot. Jana Ray had set himself a deadline and was so sure of achieving it, he was prepared to bet me. That suddenly gave me an idea.
Next morning, I drove to San Andrews under a cloudless mid-August sky. Already, the day had begun to heat up. At the office, I ran through the ansaphone messages from stations around the island. It seemed that they’d dropped the search for the two whitefellas and Tamara, the woman that Miss Stanislaus and I wanted to question in relation to Lazar Wilkinson’s murder.
Nobody here see no woman who carry dat description. She probably with a fella.
She a young-girl y’all say? Then she must have a man. Find out where the man is and she mos’ likely with de fella.’
Y’all call y’all self detective? So how come y’all can’t find she?
A couple of them sounded drunk.
I made a list of the banks in San Andrews, worked out a trajectory in my head and hit the road on foot. I figured if Jana Ray had the kind of money to pay for a university education, he would not keep the money in his house. I did the rounds of all eight banks and the response was the same from each – no account holder by the name of Jonathon Rayburn. On a whim I made my way to the Credit Union – an ancient, recently spruced-up brick building overlooking the Carenage. I went through the routine of raising my ID at a teller and asking for the boss.
A woman approached from the back of the space – stiff-backed, pressed hair hugging her scalp. Skin tight and glossed like a star-apple fruit.
‘Sorry to bother you, Miss erm . . . ?’
‘Blackwood.’
Mid-thirties – give or take a coupla years. Coal-black eyes.
‘I’m DC Digson. Quick enquiry, yunno. Youngfella name Jonathon Rayburn. Goes by the name of Jana Ray. I just checking whether he got an account here.’
Her eyes made quick darting movements from my face to my feet. ‘Yes, he has one.’
‘You know Jana Ray?’
‘We all know him. It was in the papers.’ She raised her head at the row of tellers. ‘Bright young man. Pleasant.’
‘I’d like a printout of his transactions, please, from when he opened the account to the last time he accessed it.’
A small tensing of her brows. ‘Mr Digson, I don’t think—’
‘I could get a warrant, Miss Blackwood. I could make a fuss and draw everybody’s attention to what I’m here for. That’s what you want?’
I watched her retreating back till her head disappeared behind the high partition at the far end of the room. The tellers at the service counters had their eyes on me. Thirty-two minutes later, Miss Blackwood returned with a wad of papers, pointed at a desk and dropped them on it.
I dragged a chair, my shoulders tense with the atmosphere that my presence had created.
I traced a finger down the right column on the paper. Twenty-eight thousand and ninety-two dollars and a penny over a two-year period.
I dropped an index on the figure and looked at the woman. ‘I happen to know that’s about twice the annual salary of an office worker. Jana Ray not working but he’s putting down regular deposits every Saturday. Ninety dollars every time. That make a certain kinda sense, Miss Blackwood. A spliff costs thirty dollars. So Jana Ray decided to bank three spliffs’ worth of money every week. The pattern changed last December – weekly deposits rising to five hundred d
ollars with a coupla hundred here and there. Then,’ I pointed at the last two deposits, ‘one thousand dollars, and another thousand dollars ten days later. Your job is to review accounts? Not so?’
‘It is.’ She looked completely unflustered.
‘And what this tell you – a poor-arse youngfella, still in school, with this amount of money in his account?’
‘You’re the one telling me, Mr Digson.’
‘You had an idea where the money was coming from, not so?’
For a moment, I thought she was going to deny it. When she spoke her lips barely moved. ‘I encouraged him to save his money. I opened the account for him. I’ll take full responsibility for that.’ For all her self-control, she couldn’t prevent herself from glancing at the big glass door marked, MANAGER.
‘My job is to bank money, not—’
‘Drugs money too?’
‘You not letting me finish,’ she breathed. ‘It is to further his education. You know what it is like to be poor-arse like you say and fight life on your own?’ She’d dropped her eyes on my blue silk shirt.
‘Enlighten me, Miss Blackwood.’
Now her voice was low and throaty. ‘Last June he came in with a little exercise book. He showed it to, erm, me. He worked out the cost of his university in Trinidad for the four years he was going to be there: tuition fees, rent, books, how much more he needed.’ She paused, blinked at me and swallowed. ‘Guess what he left out.’
‘Save time, Miss Blackwood. Tell me.’
‘Clothes and food.’
‘You his family?’
‘I live a few houses down from him.’
I scrolled through my memory of the residences that stood on the hillside below Jana Ray’s place. ‘Blue concrete house. Beige veranda, garage on the right side, soursop tree hanging over it – that one?’
‘That one.’
I stood up, slotted the printouts in my bag. ‘Everything you tell me makes sense, Miss Blackwood. Is not you I after but I not done with you yet.’
I scribbled my name and number. ‘Gimme a call if anything comes to mind and you think I should know.’
She saw me to the door. Fixed me with those black-agate eyes. ‘People find themselves in a hole, they’ll do anything to dig themselves out of it.’
‘You think I dunno that?’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘For what?’
She probably didn’t hear me. She was hurrying across the polished floor towards her office.
I walked out into a sizzling Camaho afternoon. A tourist liner sat beside the mile-long jetty, dwarfing the buildings and the streets. Pale, straw-hatted bodies packed the sidewalks, their multicoloured shirts and wraps patterned with parrots. I watched the throng of foreigners smiling foolishly like the natives they were meant to be observing and not mingling with. A young, heavily muscled Camahoan fella we knew as Bad Talk, with short bristling dreadlocks and misaligned teeth, was feeding the tourists what he thought they wanted to hear – his own invented history of the island and its people. His claims were so outrageous, I was tempted to arrest him.
Street vendors sat under parasols, selling beads and shells, in fact anything that could take a shine – as foreign to me as they were to the tourists. Sensible Camahoans sought refuge from the heat in air-conditioned doorways or beneath anything that cast a shade.
I called Miss Stanislaus and told her I thought I had a breakthrough with the Jana Ray case and probably Lazar Wilkinson. I gave her a quick update.
‘You still fink Jamma Ray was a good fella?’ she said.
36
I sat at my kitchen worktop, pulled out the books I picked up in Jana Ray’s bedroom. He’d desecrated mine. Not only had he wrecked the covers, he’d had a field day scribbling and drawing all over the pages. A line of stickmen climbing up a gradient with boxes ten times their size ran across the bottom margin of the inside cover. On the adjacent page were what looked like six badly drawn electric fans turned upside down, with the same number above each one. I couldn’t bear to look any more. Jana Ray’s own book was in perfect condition. ‘Sonuvabitch,’ I breathed and tossed the thing aside.
What the hell did he want with a book on growing plants without soil, anyway?
I fed a Chronixx CD into my player, mixed myself a mild rum cocktail and settled down to Jana Ray’s Hydroponics: Principles and Practice.
There was a whole section in there, heavily annotated, on plant genetics and a type of marijuana named kush. On the last few pages were two columns of tightly written script about medical marijuana and techniques for extracting marijuana oil. When I closed the book, I had a reasonable idea of what Jana Ray had been up to and if my conclusions were correct, that youngfella was a liar and a genius.
Miss Stanislaus was right, I didn’t know Jana Ray at all.
At five o’clock, I changed into a pair of cargo trousers with oversized pockets, a thick cotton shirt, a heavy pair of boots. I retrieved my Remington, hefted the weapon in my hand and hesitated over it. I’d never had a relationship with this thing – not like Malan, for whom a gun was an appendage. He’d told me once that he felt naked without the big Sig Sauer sitting against his body. Miss Stanislaus’s Ruger – I wondered if she was getting on any better with the Glock – was like a deadly piece of jewellery that she would never leave her house without.
A gun in my hand felt heavier than its weight. It threw me out of myself. In my mind, it was the thing that killed my mother. It was never what I reached for first to save myself. I unhooked my heavy leather belt from the bedroom door and threaded it through my trousers.
Night had begun to dust Old Hope valley. I’d packed my knapsack with my tools, a few tins of sardines, biscuits, a pack of candles, a multi-tool knife, a litre of tap water, an exercise mat that would serve as a mattress and Jana Ray’s thermo-hygrometer. My Remington R1 was in the hood of my bag.
I parked two miles down from the village and walked to Jana Ray’s place. I lit a couple of candles, sat on the floor, paging through his school texts, my ears trained on the darkness out there – so thick, the night felt like a living, breathing presence. A couple of times, I raised my head at the thud of footsteps on the path below. I placed the Remington on my lap when footsteps continued up the hill and seemed to stop a few feet from the house. They neither retreated nor came nearer and the oddity of the sensation raised the hairs on my neck.
Close to morning, I stretched out on the mat and took a nap, then got up and fed myself. Mid-morning I opened the door and took to the hills.
Ahead of me, the rising peaks of the Belvedere mountains, jagged and forbidding against an almost violet morning sky.
I navigated giant ferns and reeds, dripping soil, cascading vines, deep patches of darkness where forest trees laced their branches together. Old Hope was a place of water, wind and forest too. There was no one I knew from my village who could not navigate the bush.
I kept my eyes on the thermo-hygrometer.
I was looking for a wind-sheltered area, but with good air circulation, on the side of one of these mountains where the temperature was close to 74 degrees, humidity between 51 and 61. An hour later, the instrument told me I was in the zone. I began a circular hike around the mountain. A couple of hours later, I skirted a sheer drop down to a ravine full of stones, and there it was in front of me – a clearing in the middle of which a large tent-like structure stood: perforated plastic covering, propped up by bamboo.
Inside the tent, a garden of deep green plants, thick-headed and squat with clusters of knotted, purple-tinted buds. Beautiful and strange – their pistils glowed bronze in the diffuse light. The plants sat amongst a scattering of powdered limestone. Outside, at the back of the structure, was what looked like a trench, the evidence of burnt charcoal still in it. An array of bamboo pipes hung over the trench, all leading into the makeshift greenhouse – Jana Ray’s very own invention for delivering carbon dioxide to the leaves of the plants. The garden gave off the smell of pine.
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Having read his notes, I could have guessed the acidity of the soil was somewhere between 5.7 and 6, the temperature of the root zone of these plants 20 degrees Centigrade or thereabouts. Jana Ray had created his own strain of high-yield kush, and found a way to grow it here in Camaho. And this, as far as I could tell, would have been his first crop.
I took out my phone and Googled ‘kush price per ounce’.
Result: 375–500 US Dollars.
More expensive than cocaine. No wonder he was not interested in Dessie’s job offer.
My watch said 4.07pm. With my gun in my lap, I sat on a patch of dead leaves outside the greenhouse and ate the sardine sandwich I had made.
Heads and eyes – they tell you everything if a pusson knew what to look for. I learned that from Miss Stanislaus. I thought of the sideways shift of Jana Ray’s eyes when I pushed him hard with questions, his carefulness with words when pressed for details of Lazar Wilkinson’s dealings, that look on his face, and the odd folding of his shoulders as if to shield himself from a chilling wind. My mind returned to the ridge of flesh that branded his back. On the beach, when I asked the boys about the source of their scars, they raised their chins up past my head. Their eyes gone dark with fear before they ran off.
I threw on my backpack, edged my way down to the bottom of the ravine, following it till I came to a patch of silk cotton trees. A break in the bank led me onto mud-smeared stones, the track curving down and around a sea of dripping ferns. The climb took me to a ledge, then a field of giant volcanic boulders with a narrow path winding through them.
I followed it, found myself in a wide leaf-covered space, fenced in by mapou trees.
I entered the gloom and surveyed it: about twenty yards long, ten yards wide. Five giant cocoa baskets, their insides blackened by charcoal dust. Small metal drums, pots and pans strewn along the floor. Six bottle torches – a couple still filled with kerosene. In the centre, a row of twelve fireplaces, about four feet apart. On my left, seven six-foot sheets of corrugated galvanise, the type used to cover roofs. Five green plastic buckets, eight short lengths of wood shaved down at one end to look like pallets, four balls of string, brown wrapping, a couple of old rucksacks, an unopened packet of condoms.