The Tropical Issue (31 page)

She picked up her bag and a document case and walked to the door. ‘Dodo!’

In a moment, Mr van Damned would be out. And when he got into his car, the girl with the orange hair was bloody well going to be behind in a taxi. And wherever he was going, so was I.

I bent low, and scrambled out of the crotons.

Then I stayed bent low, because someone’s hand was on the back of my neck, holding it down like a fork, with someone’s knee on my ankles, so that I couldn’t move.

‘Bloody hold it
,’ said Johnson’s voice. ‘He’s followed.’

I held it. I heard van Diemen’s voice again, and then Natalie’s, telling Dodo something, and then a slammed door and footsteps in the front, and the sound of a car starting up. A pair of shutters opened up in Natalie’s bedroom overhead.

Johnson released me.

The nerves in my neck shrieked, and so did my ankles. He hadn’t used force, just pressure.

He said, ‘Sorry. This way, quietly,’ and disappeared into the depths of Ferdy’s garden. Out of earshot of the house, I fell over him, sitting on the grass among a clump of red ginger-flowers. I recognised them.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Overmanning in the machine room. Dangerous thing, private enterprise. What brought that on? Did you come into my cabin last night?’

The blanket. As Amy Faflick said, he was too damned quick. I sat down, and saw that my face had already answered him. The open book.

‘O.K.’ he said. ‘Crippled centre, but lots of tough cookies round about to make up for it. Don’t follow him, don’t talk to him or you’ll gum up the works. What did you think of what you heard?’

‘That you could start a murder case with it,’ I said. ‘If you’d taped it.’

‘But we didn’t. And Natalie?’ Johnson said.

He seemed to have heard it all. I was full of ideas.

I said, ‘She could be the person you’re looking for. She could have begun the affair with van Diemen; even started him somehow on drugs, and then got a third person to blackmail van Diemen into bringing Coombe’s into their network. This meeting at Coral Reef could be the meeting you’re waiting for.’

St Lazarus. I could hear the bite in my voice.

Johnson showed no special surprise. ‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘Because Roger van Diemen isn’t going to it. Because she’s thrown him out, Natalie’s actually cleared herself. Remember, no van Diemen, no dope and banana network.’

He paused. ‘Do you want to stay with her? She may change. Ask you to alter your hair, for example.’

I said, ‘She won’t get rid of me. Neither will you. When is the meeting?’

‘I’m waiting to hear. Tonight, perhaps.’

I looked at him. He said, ‘I can’t trust you, can I, not to try and find it?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. With feeling.

I watched him. After that little game in the crotons, my opinion of his chances had gone up a bit, but as far as I was concerned, it was a split concession now. He wasn’t going to fall down on this job if I could prevent it.

He was twirling a bit of feathery ginger. He chucked it aside, and looked back at me. ‘Well, you can do something. I expect you’ll be tarting them up for the Carnival Ball. Are you free after that?’

I was.

‘Well, suppose,’ Johnson said, ‘that Raymond calls with a car to take you out on the town, and you just happen to have your fishing-tackle outfit with you? All of it?’

I could feel my smile stretching. I said, ‘No problem. Where d’you want me to do it? On
Dolly
?’

‘No,’ Johnson said. He made to get up, swore, and succeeded.

‘No, it’s life in the fast lane for you. The Hackney Carifesta team’s quarters in Bridgetown.’

‘You’re not joking,’ I said.

‘I never joke,’ said Johnson. ‘Now shut up, and listen.’

For some things, it helps a lot to be wee, and have hockey legs.

I was always the one who got sent up the tree or under the shed for the ball. I had one teacher who used to complain that, but for a few Victorian commies, I would be up there cleaning his chimneys instead of wasting his time at a school desk.

The Brighton Beach is a chalet hotel built on the shore at Oistins, just south of Government House and along the coast from Bridgetown.

The central block faces the road, and has the reception desk in it.

Through that, or by a service passage further along, you get to the chalets themselves, which are one-storey concrete apartments, each with its own kitchen and bathroom and bedroom, and a sitting-room opening on to a porch.

The chalets are joined by dimly-lit paths, and are set among flower beds, and lawns with slatted sunchairs on them.

By day and by night, quite a few of the chalets are taken by people who haven’t come for the swimming or the sunbathing, but to spend a weekend with the girlfriend, or a few days off with some drinking pals, or to do some serious gambling, or pull off an even more serious business deal with no questions asked.

Briefing, by Johnson.

He was with me somewhere in the dark that night, but I couldn’t see him. It was Raymond’s hand that led me to the chalet whose garden was next to the beach, and whose lit windows were already covered with curtains behind the glass screens.

A very small bush can cover me. Raymond found one, near the beach steps with a good view of the porch, and settled me into it. Then he found a place for himself.

People came by, on their way to the central dining-room, and came back.

Two couples went down to the beach, and only one came back.

A security man with a torch came, shining it in a bored way all round the garden, and putting it off, hitched himself on the corner of the chalet porch rail.

Two lots of footsteps came down the passage, and turned out to belong to a clerk, showing a drunk the way into the chalet.

The drunk, a man in a flowered shirt over dark trousers, took his time fishing out a couple of notes for the boy, leaned confidingly on the security man’s shoulder and staggered into the porch, holding the key to the chalet.

The light from the sitting-room shone on his face, as he opened the door and went in. He had a rum bottle in each of his pockets, and his face was covered with a Carifesta plaster mask in the shape of a cockerel, behind which he seemed to be crowing.

The door shut, and the security man shook his head and switching on his torch, wandered off.

In the chalet, a side light suddenly came on from the bathroom, followed by one from the kitchen, to one side of the door. Both windows were protected by louvres, and the light only showed in thin lines between slats, and from this wee grating covered with bug wire in the kitchen.

There was a sound of distant chinking; then the rectangle went dark, and half-bright, and dark again.

‘Swinging door into the sitting-room,’ Raymond said. ‘Van Diemen, we know, has a monkey mask.’

Two people came round the passage, went into the porch and knocked on the door of the chalet, which opened almost at once. Both wore carnival masks and both seemed to be sober. I got a glimpse, as they went in, of their clothes. One wore the same as the first man: a flowered shirt and dark trousers.

The other had on a ground-length shift and high heels. From the way she managed them, there was no doubt she was a woman.

The door closed behind them.

Silence, or sort of. The chickadees buzzed and the frogs whistled. The sea sighed on the beach. Beyond the darkness of the living quarters, the sky gave off a glow from lit gardens and dance-floors and restaurants, and the far-off murmur of music and talking sounded just like another sort of sea.

Someone brushed by my shoulder and spoke to Raymond.

‘You should go round the back,’ said Johnson’s low voice. ‘The bedroom curtains are open. The plant, I have to report, has been equipped with scrubbers.’

Raymond, in the lowest of voices, said, ‘Wow!’

‘Three wows,’ said Johnson placidly. ‘Call girls, coloured, expensive. I took a photograph. I’ll give you a peek in the dorm.’

‘Three?’ said Raymond.

‘Quite,’ said Johnson. ‘And Roger still has to come.’

I thought he was being thick. Roger van Diemen wouldn’t be interested in coloured call girls, whatever the other two fancied.

I remembered he wasn’t thick, and put my mind to it again. What he meant was, Roger still had to come. And another man.

The other man came first, walking quickly with no one to guide him. He stepped through the porch, rapped, and was admitted. The light shone on him for a second only, and showed nothing but the same uniform: the loose shirt which could have covered anything, the dark trousers and a mask.

‘I’d like to . . .’ said Raymond, and half rose.

‘No. Wait,’ said Johnson.

I hadn’t heard anything, but a moment later, footsteps echoed in the passage. Crisp footfalls belonging to a tall man in a floral shirt and a monkey mask who knocked at the same door, and waited, and then went in, rather slowly.

‘Roger van Diemen. The entire Board, I would guess,’ Johnson said. ‘Go and look now, if you’re quick. The security man will be back in a moment.’

The security man came back before Raymond did. He stood swinging his torch outside the porch, and looking idly about him. Like Johnson, Raymond made no sound coming back, but I saw his shadow lingering in the passage.

Then the security man moved away, on his patrol, and Raymond slipped over the lawn and arrived beside us. ‘They’ve drawn the curtains,’ he said. ‘If they exist. I think you were having a wet bloody dream. What about getting up close?’

‘They’re bugged,’ said Johnson.

‘And if they spot it?’ said Raymond. ‘You brought her. Why not use her?’

Men.

I was over the lawn before he had finished the sentence, and into the porch among the breakfast chairs and the bougainvillea. I crouched down in the shadows and listened.

It wasn’t as good as Ferdy’s villa, because the glass and curtains were closed. A lot of the time, I couldn’t hear what they were saying at all, and then the woman or one of the men would speak sharply, and I caught a few phrases.

The voices were blurred and none of them was familiar. I couldn’t even pick out which was Roger van Diemen. The woman could have been anybody.

It was the fault of the masks, of course. We have the same trouble with make-up. You can get a great likeness, stuffing the cheeks and adding shaped teeth and false jowls and everything, but it’s no good if the actor can’t speak through it.

There was another thing, too. If I heard too much, I couldn’t remember it.

But of course, Johnson had thought of that. Raymond suddenly was beside me.

He didn’t speak: we were too close to the window. But in the glimmer of light through the curtains, I could see him pointing.

I looked.

He was showing me the grating. The small netted grating, now dark, in the kitchen wall. Through which nothing, of course, could be heard. But which, when the door to the main room was open, might just give a glimpse of the people inside.

It was quite low. I could see it without climbing. I carried across a tub of portentias, and stood behind it, and watched.

I watched for quite a long time. I could still hear the murmur of voices, but not what they said. Once, Raymond shifted his position a little under the window and I saw the creeper shake, and go still.

There was no sign of Johnson. The security man strolled round the corner, flashing his light, then putting it out, took up his favourite position at the end of the porch rail, and began to roll a cigarette.

I crouched behind the tub. At the other end of the porch, the creeper was motionless.

Inside the sitting-room, the way they were speaking became different, and jerky. The passage beyond the end of the chalet suddenly became striped with light, as someone in the chalet moved out and into the bathroom.

Above my head, the light went on in the kitchen.

As before, it only showed in the cracks between louvres. But the ventilator had become a square of pure light. A little window into the kitchen. A little window which might let me look through the kitchen door, if it happened to open. Which might give me a glimpse, if the angle was right, of four men and one woman without their masks on.

Except that, with the guard standing in front of me, I couldn’t rise to my feet and have a look.

Above my head, a fridge door slammed, and a voice said, ‘There ain’t nothin’ here. Ice or soda. I’ll try the godammed shelves.’

A tap ran, and I could hear other cupboard doors rattling. Someone had got bored, or thirsty, or both, and was searching the kitchen.

The meeting was very likely over. Soon the man with the thirst would give up, and switch off the light, and open the door to the sitting-room and I wouldn’t see who was there, because I was squatting here like a dummy on the floor of the porch.

After which they would come out, one by one, and fall over us.

To hell with it.

The guard had his back to me. He was licking his cigarette paper, and feeling in his hip pocket for something.

I stood up, in full view if he turned, and fixed my eye to the ventilator.

I was just in time. I saw a hand turn off the tap above a full jug. I saw a tummy in a flowery shirt cross the kitchen and put a hand on the door and shove it open. I saw the man, full length now, carry the jug into the sitting-room. And as the door started to close, I saw the other three men and one woman, sitting round a littered table with two bottles of rum and some glasses on it.

One of them was Roger van Diemen, his dark brown hair curling wetly round his broad, reddened face.

The other four were the folk who had summoned him there, including the woman in heels, and the man who had come in from the kitchen.

The dope runners, according to Johnson. Whose boss had strong-armed or sweet-talked the Financial Director of Coombe’s into distributing their goodies for them, along with his bananas.

It would have been a great moment, if I had recognised them.

I didn’t, because everyone except Roger van Diemen was still wearing a mask.

The security man struck a match, and I slid down to a furious crouch, as above me the grating went dark again.