by Jacob Ross
I didn’t know if I made it.
When I opened my eyes, the boat was docked in Camaho. I was lying on a stretcher, the ambulance almost on the sidewalk of the Carenage. A woman in a light-green smock was bending over me. I recognised her as the doctor I’d seen in the hospital when Miss Stanislaus was there.
From somewhere behind, I heard Chilman’s cough. Pet had a hand on my neck.
‘I’m Dr Venfour,’ the woman said. ‘How you feeling now?’ She had the most musical voice I’d ever heard.
‘What happen?’ I said.
‘Did you have breakfast or lunch?’ the doctor said.
I blinked at her and nodded.
‘When last you slept?’
I thought about it and showed her four fingers.
‘Four what? Days?’
I nodded.
‘You haven’t slept for four days!’ She sounded so outraged, I thought she was going to leave me there and head back to her work.
‘Ease him up,’ she said.
I felt better when I came to my feet.
Chilman took me home.
‘Where’s my car?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, pointing at my sofa.
I must have dozed off because when I opened my eyes, it was dark out there. The slam of my door had woken me. Chilman must have hung around a long time.
There was a pot of pasta on the stove, still warm; a saucepan of cooked corned beef, done up with garlic, onions, cherry tomatoes and ginger. A small bowl of salad with a slice of lime and a rum glass of olive oil between them.
There was a note on the lid of the pot.
Call me when you up. Important.
PS – I borrowed a bottle.
I imagined the old fella scribbling the note, with a bottle of my best rum secured under his armpit. I shook my head and chuckled.
Next day, in the office, Miss Stanislaus took the news of her uncle’s death quietly, her hands folded in her lap, the tears dripping down her face. Pet was out for lunch.
‘I sorry,’ I said. ‘I believe Mibo was the one who take your uncle out to sea.’
‘H’was never good.’
‘After the old wimmen drive Juba out, Juba moved the camp to Beau Séjour – that was three months ago. Shadowman is Juba’ family – proper name is Ronald Hurst. Mibo said he stopped Juba from attacking the women. I don’t believe him. Miss Stanislaus, what’s Benna to these people?’
‘“These people” is us, Missa Digger.’
‘Who’s Benna?’
‘One old woman, Missa Digger.’
‘Tell me. Please.’
Her silence became a wall between us. I felt shut out.
‘You don’t trust me?’ I said. ‘I been doing all this becuz of you, Miss Stanislaus. I went all the way to Kara Island to clear your name—’
‘Your name too, Missa Digger.’
‘I not the one facing a hearing next coupla days.’
‘Not yet, Missa Digger. After me, the MJ coming for you.’
‘Okay.’ I gestured at my notes. ‘I’ll finish this. Mibo admitted that Juba had a shipment to process. Juba got killed two days before the shipment arrived in Camaho.’
‘Missa Digger, you talkin to me like if you vex with me. You vex with me?’
‘I giving you the information, not so?’
She muttered something, then shook her head.
‘Miss Stanislaus, you not interested no more?’
‘I don like your attitude, Missa Digger.’
‘I don’t like yours either, Miss Stanislaus.’
I pushed back my chair and stood up. ‘The important thing I want to tell you is Mibo confirm that everything we been thinking so far is true: we got a boat somewhere on this island and Juba was part of it but he not the one behind it. We killed Juba coupla days before the boat arrived, and bizness going on as usual. Is some “bossman” and “bosslady” behind it. I got my suspicions who the bossman is. Why you looking at me like that? I done you something?’
‘You ain got no feelins, Missa Digger.’
‘You not the one always telling me I got too much?’
‘You jus tell me my uncle got kill’ like you telling me the price ov fish, and then you go on talking as if nuffing happen! Den you insult me by gettin off the chair and walking off.’
‘I tell you I sorry, not so? And I didn’ walk off. I still standing here.’
‘Would’ve been better if you walk off.’
‘Jeezas! I dunno how to please you.’
‘No, you dunno!’
‘Thank you!’
I returned to my seat.
She sat there glaring at me for a few minutes, then she got up and walked out.
I called Chilman.
‘Digson, you sound upset! What happen?’
I filled him in and ended with Mibo’s connection with Koku’s murder.
‘That don’t relate to y’all shooting down Juba.’
‘The cocaine-cooking factory directly related, Sir. Killing Lazar Wilkinson and Jana Ray is part of it. I can argue that at the hearing. The rest is persuasion.’
‘Who will do the persuading, Digson?’
‘Me,’ I said.
‘You can’t. In Red Pig mind, persuasion is provocation from you.’
‘I don unnerstan, Sir.’
‘The MJ – he don like you, Digson. Something about you frighten him. All of this is about you, from the first big case y’all do two years ago when y’all expose his dealings with that preacherman name Bello.’
‘Then I’ll pass the files to you.’
‘Fank you,’ he said and cut off.
Miss Stanislaus returned, slowed down at my desk and dropped something on it. I smelled fish roti. I raised my head at her, uncertain of her mood. There was a question in her eyes. I thought I understood it.
‘Was sudden,’ I said. ‘Missa Koku hardly feel any kinda pain.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
I held up a folder. ‘I want to rehearse this with you. For the hearing.’
‘Nuh.’
‘You don’t want to go through it?’
‘Nuh.’
‘It will help if you rehearse it.’
‘You don’t rehearse the truth, Missa Digger, you tell it.’
‘Your father will be defending your case tomorrow. I want him to go there half-drunk.’
‘Missa Digger, you know what you sayin?’
‘Yep! His mind work quicker when he half-drunk – a lot quicker.’ I turned my chair to face her. She was patting her brows with a tissue. ‘Miss Stanislaus, answer me honest. How you going to feel if the hearing never happen tomorrow? Cuz is going be hell for everybody.’
The tissue froze. ‘Is possible?’
‘Dunno, I kin try. But mebbe you prefer to fight back?’
‘I been fightin from de start, Missa Digger. In here.’ She pointed at her head. ‘And it worry me an make me tired.’ She turned her head away.
I picked up my file. ‘I tired too, Miss Stanislaus.’
I called the Commissioner’s office and asked his secretary to inform him that Mr Michael Digson was on the way. She told me he was busy for the next couple of hours. I said I would wait.
50
An old wood-panelled room with big windows. On the wall, portraits of all the Police Commissioners who had gone before. The history of the island was in those pictures, a long row of portraits of white stiff-backed colonials; after them a couple of light-skinned Barbadian mulattoes, after them the ‘brownings’; and now the milked cocoa of my father. Another coupla decades or so, they’d probably be obsidian.
A parade of men in too-tight suits and shirt-jacks trailed in and out with suitcases in their hands. My father’s voice was a pleasant baritone, always with a hint of humour. It felt as if I didn’t know him at all.
Finally my name.
I walked in. He gestured at the chair directly facing him. ‘You look harassed,’ he said. ‘What’s happening with you?’
> ‘I’m alright,’ I said. ‘For the hearing tomorrow, I brought some information. I know you s’posed to get the information same time like everybody else—’
‘But?’ he cut in, smiling.
‘I giving you a head start, Sir.’
I placed the file in front of him. In seconds, he was deep in it. I liked watching him concentrate, brows pulled tight, his eyelids like half-closed shutters, his mouth a clenched line. I would never let him know that.
When he finished, he sorted the papers into two neat piles. ‘This,’ he said nudging the pile with the notes and photographs of Koku’s murder, ‘is useful. In fact, important. That,’ he lifted the other pile with my notes on the MJ’s indiscretions and slid them back at me, ‘is suicide.’
He sat back. ‘It is a bomb in your hand, Michael. If it goes off it will destroy you too.’
He stood up, looking down on my head. ‘I told you before, you can embarrass a man in the MJ’s position and get away with it. Humiliation is a different matter.’ He reached for the pile he’d just pushed back. ‘This might win the opposition an election. They’ll thank you for it. But they’ll know that you’re a danger to them too.’
‘The MJ got something on you?’ I said.
He sat back. ‘No, Michael. My one indiscretion is you. And you’re the person who doesn’t want me to broadcast it, because I’m very proud of the fact. You wouldn’t come to my office unless you want something. What’re you asking for now?’
I looked him in the eye. ‘For you to take back your job from the MJ, so I could respect you. I, erm, I want to feel good about you as my father. And I don’t want this hearing to happen, either, because,’ I pointed at the notes that he’d rejected, ‘I’ll use whatever I got at my disposal to defend myself and Miss Stanislaus.’
He stared out the window. Our silence lasted minutes.
I stood up and gathered my papers.
He roused himself and reached for the phone. ‘Sharon,’ he said, ‘get me the Prime Minister’s office.’
He re-cradled the handset, pointed at the documents in my hand. ‘I’ll have those too. All of them.’
He nodded me out of his office.
Back at my desk in San Andrews CID. My roti had gone cold. Miss Stanislaus stared at it, then at me, her mouth twisted with displeasure.
The office phone rang. Pet answered. She handed it to me. It was Sharon, the Commissioner’s PA.
We were not required at the meeting tomorrow, she said.
‘Not required – that means it’s happening anyway?’
She hesitated before asking me to hold on.
‘Michael? There’s going to be a meeting. I’ve insisted! But there’s not going to be a hearing. And,’ the Commissioner sounded belligerent, ‘just to inform you, I’m having Officer Mibo arrested today!’
I passed on the news to Miss Stanislaus and Pet.
Pet broke out in sniffles. Miss Stanislaus hurried off to the bathroom.
I walked out to the courtyard, struggling to control my breathing.
51
Chilman decided to call in his ‘forces’ for a ‘head-knocking’ session. That included the Commissioner. I told him I needed a full day to pull the information I’d gathered together before that happened. The Old Bull agreed.
I passed the time at home with a mix of vintage rum and coffee at my elbow, my laptop and several sheets of grid-lined paper. I needed to piece together and crosscheck everything I’d learned so far from Eric, Jana Ray’s drawings and what Mibo had told me.
When I turned up the next day, a table sat in the middle of the space, a dazzling white tablecloth laid out on it with the kind of food that had me grinning foolishly at everyone.
Cornky wrapped in plantain leaves, potato pone, cassava bread, corn bread, tania porridge, stuffed crab-back and crayfish done in the way that Miss Stanislaus claimed only she knew how: marinaded and baked then blessed with peppery sauce. From time to time, she presented me with a bit of one or the other, but never the whole assembly.
‘Everything here for me?’ I said, jigging around the table. I took Miss Stanislaus’s hand and bowed the way I did with the old women on Kara Island.
Chilman burst out in a series of dry chuckles. ‘Digson, you’z a jackass!’
Pet threw me a sidelong glance, smiled and shook her head. Miss Stanislaus was fluttering like a butterfly. ‘Missa Digger, why you so chupid? Is just a lil somefing, yunno. A lil bit of light, becuz we come out ov all that darkness.’
‘The woman is a poet too,’ I said. I fetched some plates from the tiny kitchen at the back, served them first then packed my plate.
‘Digson, yuh brain in your blaastid belly.’
I wagged a crayfish in his face. ‘Correct! Along with lobsters, crayfish is the only creature that got a belly where the brain should be.’ I tilted my head and dropped the whole thing in my mouth.
Caran turned up late afternoon with his troop. He dropped a bag of mangoes in the middle of the office, gave me a highfive and dragged a chair.
Spiderface, our boatman, sat beside the door, his head down, looking jittery. He’d just returned from taking Sarona, Malan’s woman, to Grand Beach by boat. Pet, her hands poised over her keyboard, was a living picture of a don’tplay-de-arse-with-me office admin. Caran’s crew stood like a group sculpture in the far left corner of the room.
Malan had a shoulder against the door. As chance would have it, he’d dropped in to hand over Miss Stanislaus’s Ruger and ‘to see what go on’ and nobody couldn stop him. Truth was, I’d messaged him about the meeting.
The Commissioner arrived dressed for the beach – in khaki shorts, sandals, a short-sleeved shirt and a small towel on his shoulder. He nodded at the room and took a chair beside Chilman.
‘Start shootin’, Digson!’ Chilman said.
As always, I raised my brows Django-style. ‘You sure?’
I received the usual sour-faced grin from him.
‘Is all one case,’ I said. ‘Juba, Lazar Wilkinson, Jana Ray, the drugs factory, the two whitefellas and the boat. They all connected. We chasing after a single case and is all about a drugs boat that we can’t find and we got to find.’
‘What you have so far?’ Chilman said.
‘Five weeks ago, a black catamaran arrived at Beau Séjour late at night and unloaded a cargo of cocaine base which, from what Mibo told me, came from Venezuela. The aim was to refine the stuff in Camaho and then take it elsewhere. Between the boat arriving and the cocaine base getting processed, Lazar Wilkinson and Jana Ray got murdered – Lazar Wilkinson because, from what Mibo says, he was demanding a share based on the value of the cocaine, not a straight fee. Else, he threatened to report them to us. That threat, it seems to me, might’ve been the reason for killing him. Somebody Mibo referred to as the bossman had a problem with that. Little Eric talked about a ‘Townman’ with pale skin that he saw cussing Lazar Wilkinson. I believe that the Townman and the bossman are different names for the same person.
‘I not detailing what I think lay behind the Jana Ray murder again, except to say that Miss Stanislaus and I worked out from his drawings that the boat had two broken propellers that need fixing or replacing. Mibo also confirmed that they had what he called a transmission problem. He said Shadowman told him, so he’s clearly connected to Shadowman.
‘I suspect the boat is still here, and if the boat is still here, the drivers still here too.
‘In short, we looking for a boat packed with refined cocaine, somewhere on this island waiting for two propeller replacements.’
‘How much engine it got?’
‘Six.’
‘Six! Digson, you sure?’ The DS clearly didn’t believe me. He raised a finger at Spiderface. ‘That make sense to you?’
Spiderface looked startled. ‘If Missa Digger say so, Sah.’
‘Digger already say so,’ Chilman grated. ‘I want to know what you say.’
‘I dunno, Sah. It don’ make sense to me, Sah.’ Spiderface passed
me an apologetic look.
‘Digson, is facts I want—’
‘You want me to hand over the case to you, Sir?’
‘Why you frettin now, eh?’ Chilman raised a finger at me.
‘Cuz people don’ believe Missa Digger!’ Miss Stanislaus addressed the window fretfully. ‘And is all this not-believin been causing problem. Missa Digger, persevere, please.’
I persevered. ’What don’t make no sense to me is the way lil Eric described the boat and where Mibo and Jana Ray say it will be heading.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Europe.’
‘What puzzle you bout that?’
‘Based on what I understand from Mibo and Eric, is a speedboat, with only a windshield to protect them from the weather. It can’t make a five-thousand-mile transatlantic run, unless they have a rendezvous along the way with a ship or something capable of doing that distance.’
‘So is a ship we lookin for!’ Chilman said.
‘So why people can’t find it if is a ship?’ The sneer was in Malan’s voice.
‘Is simple,’ Chilman growled. ‘They’ll offload on a bigger boat further out.’
‘Exact details not important right now,’ Caran cut in gently. ‘Digger, finish what you saying.’
‘From Eric’s description, the boat is one of them catamaran types designed for speed and stability – I spent half a night searching around on Google. From his description the boat got no cabin – in other words, no sleeping facilities, and,’ I dropped the report on my desk, ‘even drug runners need to sleep. Venezuela to Camaho is five hundred miles – that makes sense. They could cover that distance during daylight in under a day with a go-fast boat. The next stop should be in a day also, or less, and that’s definitely not Europe.’
‘So Mibo and the lil boy lying!’ Chilman said.
The Commissioner cleared his throat. ‘If there is a boat and it involves international waters, we have an arrangement with the American Coast Guard. From what I heard they have helicopters. Some time ago – early last year, I think – I met with the Regional Drugs Monitor, one Mister Cunningham—’