Crackdown (3 page)

Just as
Hirondelle
had sailed to her adventure.

But, in its place, had found a coral scrap of land called Murder Cay. And there died.

W
e docked at midday. The deserted boatyard was swimming in heat. It was well into the charter business’s low season, so the vast majority of Cutwater’s yachts had either gone north for the summer or were sitting on jackstands out of the water. A couple of our bareboat yachts were still at sea, and
Wavebreaker
had one more paying charter to complete, but otherwise McIllvanney’s yard had the torpor of tropical summer about it. Even Stella, McIllvanney’s long-suffering secretary, had taken the day off, leaving the office locked, which meant I had to walk into town to find a public telephone from which I called the Bahamian Police and told them about
Hirondelle,
and added that I had rescued a chart and a handful of cartridges from the stricken boat. The police sounded surprised that I had bothered to call them, and I walked back to the boatyard feeling strangely foolish.

Ellen laughed at my punctiliousness. Doubtless the police had responded to my call by sharpening their cutlasses and charging their muskets, she mocked, in readiness for an invasion of Murder Cay?

“I didn’t mention Murder Cay,” I said. “I just told them about the bullet damage to the boat and about the chart.”

“Well now that you’ve single-handedly won the war on drugs, perhaps you can do something useful, like scrub the deck?” We had only this one day to resupply and prepare
Wavebreaker
for her last charter, which meant the schooner had to be refuelled and provisioned, her carpets must be vacuumed, her bilges poisoned against rats and cockroaches, her galley made spotless, her deck scrubbed and her brightwork polished.

In the middle of the afternoon, when it seemed that the work would never be done on time, Bellybutton arrived at the yard. Bellybutton was McIllvanney’s foreman, and for a few seconds I dared hope that he had come to help us, but instead he told me that one of the bareboat thirty-three-footers was in trouble. “The man radioed that his engine broke,” Bellybutton grumbled, “so I have to fetch the idiot in
Starkisser.”
He was pretending that the errand was a nuisance, though at the same time he was grinning with pleasure at the thought of taking Mclllvanney’s brand new sportsboat to sea.
Starkisser’s
midnight-blue hull had metalflake embedded in its fibreglass so that the sleek boat seemed to scintillate with an internal and infernal dark blue light. She had to be one of the fastest production boats in the islands; her twin big-block engines could hurl the three-ton wedge-shaped hull at over eighty miles an hour, and it worried neither McIllvanney nor Bellybutton that at such a speed a man could not hear himself scream and that even the smallest wave shook the bones right out of their flesh.

“There ain’t a girl in creation who don’t melt after a ride in
Starkisser,”
Bellybutton liked to boast. His real name was Benjamin, but no one ever called him Benjamin or even Ben. To the whole island he was Bellybutton. It was rumoured he had earned the nickname by biting the navel clean out of a whore who had displeased him, and I found the rumour all too believable for he was not a pleasant man. In fact he was a black version of McIllvanney himself; rangy, knowing, tall and sarcastic. “Mr Mac wants to see you tonight,” Bellybutton leered at me, as though he suspected I would not enjoy the meeting. “He says you’re to go to his place at sundown.”

“Why isn’t he in the yard today?” I asked.

“Mr Mac’s taking a day off!” Bellybutton said in an indignant voice, as though my question had impugned McIllvanney’s honour. “He has business to take care of. He had to take a boat to Miami, and that’s why he give me the keys to
Starkisser.
You maybe want to take Miss Ellen for a ride in
Starkisser?”
He dangled the sports-boat’s keys enticingly. “I won’t tell Mr Mac, long as you give me a ride on Miss Ellen when you’re done.” He laughed and obscenely pumped his lean hips.

“You’re an offensive shit, Bellybutton,” I said in a very friendly voice, but he had already turned his attention away from me because a car had suddenly appeared in the yard. It was a long white Lincoln with black-tinted windows. The car slid quietly between the cradled yachts to stop just short of
Wavebreaker’s
pier. Apart from the crunching sound of the tyres the Lincoln’s approach had been silent and oddly sinister.

One of the passenger doors opened and a very tall and very black-skinned man climbed slowly into the sunlight. “A friend of yours?” I asked Bellybutton, but his eyes widened, he muttered a curse and, instead of answering, he dashed frantically towards
Starkisser’s
pontoon.

The tall black man who had emerged from the Lincoln was dressed in a dark blue three-piece suit that looked incongruously heavy for such a hot day. He wore the elegantly cut suit over a white shirt and an old Etonian tie. He was impressively built; thin hipped and wide shouldered, like a boxer who could punch hard and dance lightly. He looked calmly around the yard, then put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses before slamming the car door shut.

Bellybutton had thrown off
Starkisser
’s lines and now let the sportsboat float away from the pontoon as he unclipped her jet-black cockpit cover. Then, plainly frantic to escape the elegant man, he punched the boat’s engines into life. The echo of the twin motors crackled back from the nearby buildings like the sound of a battle-tank firing up for action. Scared pelicans flapped away, and Ellen came up from the galley to see what had caused the commotion. Bellybutton gave one last look at the man walking along the dock, then shoved
Starkisser
’s tachometers way into their red zones so that the dark blue powerboat stood on her tail and screamed out to sea as though the devil himself was on her tail.

“A guilty conscience is a terrible thing.” The tall black man chuckled, then sauntered across
Wavebreaker’s
gangplank. Once on deck he stopped to admire Ellen who was dressed in a brief pair of shorts and a faded tank top. Even with her glorious hair scraped back into a loose bun, and with her hands and face smeared with soap and sweat from the exertions of scrubbing the galley stove, she looked utterly beguiling. The black man momentarily took off his sunglasses as though to examine Ellen more closely and I saw he had very hard and very cynical eyes that were suddenly turned full on me. “You must be Breakspear.”

“Yes.”

“My name is Deacon Billingsley—” he paused as though I should recognise the name, “and I am a police officer.”

The arrival of Deacon Billingsley should have given me the satisfaction that my telephone call had been treated seriously, but I sensed this policeman was not going to offer me any satisfaction at all. He had spoken very flatly, making his introduction sound like a threat. The sun, mirrored in the obsidian brightness of his glasses, momentarily dazzled me. “What were you doing when you found
Hirondelle,
Breakspear?” Billingsley asked me.

“Making passage.”

“Making passage.” He mocked my British accent, then turned on Ellen who had stayed on deck to hear the conversation. “Where were you coming from, lady?”

“Hey! Count me out, OK? I didn’t call any goddamn cavalry. You want to know anything about that boat, you ask Nick, not me.” She twisted contemptuously towards the companionway.

Billingsley watched her walk away. “She’s American?” He seemed amused rather than offended by Ellen’s defiance.

“She’s American,” I confirmed.

Ellen dropped out of sight and Billingsley turned back to me. “Are you screwing the American, Breakspear?” I was so astonished by the sudden question that I just gaped at him. “Are you laying the girl?” Billingsley rephrased his insolent question as though I had not understood the first version. His tone of voice was so bland that he might as well have been asking my opinion of
Wavebreaker’s
sea-keeping qualities.

“The answer is no,” I finally said, “and fuck off.”

Billingsley lit a cigar. It had a red and yellow band on which I could just read the word
Cubana.
He took his time; first cutting the cigar, then heating its tip with a succession of matches that he carelessly and provocatively dropped on to
Wavebreaker’s
scrubbed deck. He used the toes of his expensive brogues to grind each dead match into the teakwood so that the charred tips smeared black carbonised streaks across the wood’s bone-whiteness. He finally drew the cigar into red heat and discarded the final match. He raised his eyes to stare into my face, and I felt a surge of fear. It was not Billingsley’s physical size that provoked that fear, for I was of a size with him, nor was it his profession that gave me pause, but rather the aura of incipient violence that he radiated like a blast furnace. “You mess with me, Breakspear,” he said in a deceptively mild voice, “and I’ll rip your spine out of your asshole.”

I was damned if I would show him my fear. “Do you have a warrant card?” I asked him instead.

For a second I thought he was going to hit me, but then he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a wallet that he unfolded and thrust towards me, giving me just enough time to see that he held the rank of chief inspector, one of the highest ranks in the Bahamian police force, then the wallet was snapped shut and Deacon Billingsley moved to stand very close to me, so close that I could smell the cigar smoke on his breath. “Where’s the chart you took from
Hirondelle?”

“Down below.”

“Then fetch it,” he said dismissively.

I obeyed. The chart had dried into stiff and faded folds, but Billingsley did not look at it, instead he just screwed it up and thrust it into a pocket of his expensive jacket.

“I also found these,” I said, and offered him the handful of cartridge cases.

He ignored my outstretched hand. “What were you doing at Sister Island, Breakspear?”

The question puzzled me for I had not mentioned Sister Island, nor its old name of Murder Cay, to either the police or to the Defence Forces, nor had Billingsley troubled to look at the pencilled line on the chart, yet he had somehow connected
Hirondelle
with the mysterious island. “I asked you what you were doing at Sister Island,” Deacon Billingsley said threateningly.

“We weren’t anywhere near the island!” I protested. “You can check that for yourself! I reported the co-ordinates where we found
Hirondelle
over the radio, and those co-ordinates are twenty miles north-west of Sister Island. That’s as close as we ever got to it.”

He said nothing for a few seconds, and I sensed that I might have unsettled this policeman. I had also angered him, though his anger seemed directed at himself. He had come here on a misunderstanding; believing that
Wavebreaker
had been at Murder Cay when in fact we had not even been within sight of that mysterious island.

But Billingsley had clearly known about
Hirondelle’
s visit to Murder Cay, and I realised that this senior police officer had not come here to enquire into a crime, but to cover it up.
Hirondelle’
s owners, he said glibly, had decided to fly home and, despairing of ever selling the yacht in a glutted market, had simply abandoned it and someone had evidently used the hulk for target practice. “Maybe it was the Americans,” Billingsley suggested airily, “you know there’s a naval exercise in progress? Perhaps they machine-gunned the hulk?”

“Those cartridge cases aren’t American issue,” I said, holding out the green-lacquered steel casings. I should have kept my silence, for the only purpose my words served was to demonstrate my disbelief in Billingsley’s outrageous explanation.

That disbelief was a challenge, and Deacon Billingsley was not a man to resist a challenge. He tipped my hand with his own strong grasp, spilling the cartridge cases into his left palm, then, one by one, he tossed the cartridge cases overboard. “You have a boat in the Bahamas.” It was not a question, but a flat statement. “A ketch called
Masquerade,
presently marooned on Straker’s Cay.”

“She’s not marooned,” I said, “she’s under repair.”

He ignored my emendation, but just continued to toss the cartridge cases over the gunwale. “And how will you repair your boat, Breakspear, or even take her away, if I put your name on the Stop List? You do know what the Stop List is, Breakspear?”

I knew only too well. It was the list of undesirable aliens who were banned from entering the Bahamas, and if my name was put on that Stop List, and if I was then thrown off the islands, I would probably never see my boat again. The threat was effective and blunt.

“Do you understand me?” Billingsley asked as he threw the last cartridge overboard. I suspected that as soon as he left the boatyard the chart would be similarly destroyed. Doubtless
Hirondelle
had already been blown up, just as my own boat would be butchered if I insisted on challenging this man. “Do you understand me?” he asked a second time.

“Yes.” I tasted the sourness of humble pie.

“So do you still find anything suspicious in the circumstances surrounding your discovery of the yacht
Hirondelle?”
Billingsley asked with a mocking punctiliousness that was intended to humiliate me, but the humiliation was my own fault for having challenged the policeman’s lie.

“No,” I said, and hated myself for telling the untruth, but I was thinking of my own boat standing propped on the sand of Straker’s Cay, and I thought of all the work I had lavished on
Masquerade,
and of all the love and care and time I had poured into her, and I tried to imagine her rotting under the tropical sun with her paint peeling, her deck planks opening and her timbers riddled with termites. So I lied and said I detected nothing untoward in finding a bullet-riddled boat awash in the Bahamian seas.

Chief Inspector Deacon Billingsley raised his right hand and victoriously, patronisingly and very gently, patted my cheek so that I felt the cold touch of his heavy gold rings. “Good boy,” he said derisively. “And when you see Bellybutton, tell him that I know where his brother is, and I’ll pick the bastard up whenever I choose and then feed him head first into a cane-shredder.” He turned abruptly away, not waiting for any answer. The gangplank bounced under his confident step. He walked down the quay without looking back, but he must have known I was watching him for he stopped a few yards short of his car and very ostentatiously took the incriminating chart from his jacket pocket. I thought for a second he was going to burn it, but instead he tore it into tiny scraps that he tossed into the warm wind.