Crackdown (29 page)

“I’m just doing a delivery job, all right!” He turned, clearly upset by my jocular accusation. He rammed his fingers towards my eyes as though trying to blind me, but instead forcing me to take a backwards step along the pontoon. “I’m just delivering the bint to a client!”

“OK! Forget I spoke!” I said placatingly.

“I’m just delivering her to a client, and when he’s used the stupid cow, I fetch her back. Either me or Bellybutton fetches her back, but there’s no funny business, you understand?” He walked on, simmering with fury.
Starkisser
rocked gently beside the pontoon and I noted how skilfully Bellybutton had painted the silver star on her long glittering bow. He had added a lipstick-red cupid’s mouth at the very centre of the shooting star. Bellybutton himself had sidled away from my unexpected arrival, scuttling away up the office stairs as though he was desperate to avoid me.

McIllvanney took the same stairs two at a time, while I hobbled behind him. Bellybutton, as I entered the office, was finishing a telephone call. He gave me his usual sly and maniacal grin, then edged about the room towards the door. Stella had already found the necessary papers in the filing cabinet and now spread them on McIllvanney’s desk. “Sign wherever there’s a pencil cross,” McIllvanney curtly ordered me. Bellybutton, the door safely reached, gave one last mocking smile and was gone.

I began reading the top form.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” McIllvanney complained, “but are you going to read every word before you sign them?”

“Yes.”

He growled, but there was nothing he could do. Stella, with a friendly but nervous smile to me, had slipped out of the office to buy some milk, leaving me alone with McIllvanney who stared angrily out of the window while I methodically read through the small print and sub-clauses and obfuscations of the various forms. Yet, despite having been written by language-murdering lawyers, the forms were straightforward enough; mere formalities to do with insurance and with
Wavebreaker’s
condition on the morning she sank. I began signing the forms, first authenticating my own qualifications to prove that the boat had been under competent command, though that, I thought, was a dubious assertion, for in fact
Wavebreaker
had been pirated before she sank. “I hear you’re salvaging her?” I said to McIllvanney.

“Aye.” He was adding his own signature to some of the forms and, for a moment, he seemed reluctant to say any more, then he decided that a modicum of politeness might hasten the scribbling of my signatures, and so he grudgingly elaborated. “They say they’ll have her up by tomorrow night.”

“I’d be grateful if you could find Thessy’s Bible for me, and ask Stella to send it on to his father?”

I thought he would refuse the favour, but then he nodded curtly before sweeping the signed papers into an envelope. Donna was doing aerobic exercises on
Junkanoo’
s rear deck, a sight to provoke cardiac arrest. “Do you know what the hell has happened to Ellen?”
McIllvanney
asked me. He had his back to the window as he wrote an address on the envelope.

So far as I knew Ellen was on board
Addendum,
and hopefully in the Florida Keys by now, but I had no intention of letting McIllvanney know anything about her travels. “Has Ellen been away?” I asked ingenuously instead.

McIllvanney responded to my mock-innocent question with a filthy look. “Of course she’s been away. She went to the funeral, and she hasn’t been seen since. I know that, because I went to her flat on Sunday, but she wasn’t there.”

“Why don’t you just leave her alone?” I asked with rising anger. “She’s not for hire. She’s not going to become one of your whores, so just forget her!”

“It’s none of your focking business why I want to talk to the bint, and—”

The clashing noise of the pistol’s cocking action stopped his voice cold. He looked up, and for once I actually saw McIllvanney go pale. He was staring into the cavernous black muzzle of my .455 Webley pistol. It is a very frightening pistol. For a start it fires an enormous bullet, so the barrel gapes alarmingly, and the gun is built on a gigantic scale. The weapon is almost a foot long. As it happened the gun which was threatening McIllvanney was not loaded, but he did not know that, and the sweat was prickling at his forehead. “Ellen is not for hire,” I said again, but this time very slowly and very distinctly.

“Jesus goddamn wept.” McIllvanney, still pale, stared in horror at the gun’s gaping muzzle. “Christ in his heaven, but why the hell are you carrying that, you fool?”

“Because there are men out there who might want to take revenge for the deaths of the guys I killed. It’s like a family feud, but I’ll be damned before I make it easy for them to finish me off.” The gun had made a hard uncomfortable lump at the small of my back, and I had been glad of the chance to take it out and thus remove the pressure from my spine.

Now the unloaded gun was pointing directly at the bridge of McIllvanney’s nose. He was shaking, and I was using both hands to train the gun, just as if it really was primed to go pop and I was preparing for the mule-like kick of the recoil. “Ellen is not for hire,” I said a third time. “Do you understand me?”

“Bloody hell fire!” McIllvanney stared wide-eyed at me, and his voice took on the aggrieved tone of wounded innocence. “I only wanted to do the girl a favour! Ned Carraway needs a cook on board
Hobgoblin
because his girl has caught the pox or something, and Ned phoned me to ask if Ellen could step in for a few days!” Ned Carraway was the owner and skipper of a beautiful locally built schooner,
Hobgoblin,
which was a few feet shorter than
Wavebreaker
and several light years prettier.
Hobgoblin
was built of wood and was bereft of almost every modern comfort except the sheer loveliness of sailing blue seas in a proper wooden boat, though the price that Ned and his American wife paid was to spend most of their spare time painting the beast or coaxing its ill-tempered and dangerous petrol engine into brief and reluctant life.

So Ned had needed a replacement cook? I stared at McIllvanney who, sensing my discomfort, pushed the telephone towards me. “If you don’t believe me, phone him!”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid and lowering the gun.

“You’re focking mad!” McIllvanney said fervently. I had scared the daylights out of him, which was something of an achievement, even though I now felt like an idiot.

“Ellen’s got a job looking after a friend’s boat,” I said helpfully, “so I don’t know if she can work for Ned, but if she’s in touch I’ll pass on the message.”

“Ned’s probably found someone else by now. He was pretty desperate, so he was.” McIllvanney was still shaking with the fear that had made him loquacious. It really is very unpleasant indeed to stare into a gun’s muzzle.

I held the gun loosely in my left hand. “It wasn’t loaded,” I told McIllvanney, as though that might make him feel better.

“I don’t give a toss! You should be locked up! Who the hell do you think is coming after you?”

“Sweetman. And the other fellow, Miguel. The guys who were on
Dream Baby.
Which reminds me. Can you remember where you saw
Dream Baby?
Because if I can find her, then I’ll find the guys who were responsible for Thessy’s death.”

“You’re mad! You think that boat is still around? They’ll have got rid of
Dream-focking-Baby
long ago. They’ll have sunk her, so they will. They don’t want trouble, you fool, any more than the rest of us want trouble.”

I pushed the gun into the sweaty space at the small of my back, then let my shirt fall like a curtain over it. “You want me to post your letter?” I offered.

“You’re a lunatic.” McIllvanney was beginning to recover his equilibrium. He opened his window and shouted down at Bellybutton who was pretending to do some work on the pontoons, but in reality was ogling the lubricious Donna. “Hey, Bellybutton! If you ever see Nick Breakspear in this yard again, you run him off, you hear me? Run him off!”

Bellybutton and Donna both stared in surprise at the office window. McIllvanney, pleased with himself, slammed it shut, then glared at Stella, his secretary, who was standing in the doorway with a carton of milk. “And that goes for you, too,” he told her, “if you see this bastard in my yard again, call the police.”

“Yes, Mr McIllvanney.” Stella said nervously.

“Now you,” he pointed at me, “fock away off.”

“Give me my money first.” I did not dare ask him for the money I had earned on the Crowninshield charter, guessing that a sunken schooner had probably voided that contract, but I still wanted my slice from the proctologist and the lawyers.

McIllvanney scribbled me a cheque that he bad-temperedly threw across the desk. I smiled my thanks, then, obedient to his wishes, focked away off.

I
went directly from McIllvanney’s office to the bank, determined to cash his cheque before perversity decided him to stop payment. With that precaution successfully accomplished I was left with the best part of a day to kill before I could catch a return ferry, so I found a public telephone that worked and dialled the Maggot’s number. I was half hoping that the big man would offer to fly me home to Straker’s Cay, but I also wanted reassurance that he had delivered Ellen safely to
Addendum’s
marina. Or perhaps I just wanted to talk to someone about Ellen; I had the disease of all lovers, the need to spread my happiness to whoever could be persuaded to listen.

But that was not to be the Maggot, for all I reached was his answering machine that first belched at me, then chuckled, then instructed me to lay the word down on him. I complied, saying that I would try to reach him later and would buy him a beer if he was free at lunchtime.

I then bought a copy of the
Nassau Guardian
and took it to a bar where, under the soft thump of a revolving ceiling fan, I sipped a pale beer and read about the new Health Clinic on Great Exuma, and about how the Combined Baptist Choirs of Great Abaco would be raising their voices to the Lord in a Concert of Praise on Sunday next, and how the dead body that had been discovered on the east coast of Andros had now been identified as that of an American tourist, Jackson Chatterton.

I stared at the newspaper. It was shaking, but whether it was my hand or the draught from the fan I could not tell.

The newspaper reported that Jackson Chatterton had drowned, and that his body had been in the water for some time before it was discovered. His remains had now been delivered into the care of the American authorities. It was a little filler of a story, a squib to take up space, but it left me quaking with horror.

Oh God, no, I prayed. No, please God. I closed my eyes very tight, but that did not help, so I opened them again and stared at the small story that was so very bland, and I supposed that Chatterton’s killers must have been waiting on the ferry, because they had surely assumed that all of us would be leaving Straker’s Cay on the next sailing after Thessy’s funeral. But instead they had only found Jackson, which meant they must still be looking for Ellen and me, and I remembered Warren Smedley’s warning, that I had treated so lightly, and I felt stark naked and very vulnerable in that hot, brightly painted bar; I looked frenetically around me, but there were only two men playing dominoes, a dog that was twitching in its flea-ridden sleep, and a barman who gave me a very odd look as though he suspected I was already drunk.

I tore the story from the newspaper and shoved it into my pocket. The gun was a cold hard lump in my back. I felt certain that everyone could see its obvious shape beneath my shirt. My heart was thumping. I was frightened. I was still having difficulty in coming to terms with the news.

Jackson Chatterton was dead. The big, stolid, angry, gentle man was dead. I remembered his childish delight in being photographed in front of the great seas that had been running before the storm, and I felt a surge of impotent anger at the men who had killed him, and doubtless they were the same men who would be trying to murder Ellen and me. They were not just taking revenge for the deaths of the two gunmen, but destroying all the witnesses to Thessy’s murder.

And suppose I was the only witness left alive? Suppose that Ellen had not sailed away? My blood was running cold with terror as I abandoned what was left of my beer and went into the sweltering street. There were no taxis. God damn it, there were no taxis! The street was crowded with cheerful American sailors, come ashore from one of the naval ships engaged in Exercise Stingray, and the sailors seemed to have taken all the cabs. I pushed through the crowds on the pavement, balefully watching for any face that watched me. I saw no one suspicious, but I did see a taxi suddenly swerve to drop three sailors outside a massage parlour, and I shouted at it, waved, then commandeered it by climbing inside.

I paid off the cab at the marina where
Addendum
had been moored, and from where Ellen should have sailed two days before. The marina’s gate was open and unguarded. Next to the gate was a small office, but, though its door was open and a small battered radio was playing rock music, the office was empty.

I ran down to the pontoons. I could see a score of monohulls, and the usual cluster of gleaming motor yachts, but there were no catamarans moored in the marina. I felt a surge of relief that Ellen was safe, for I knew our enemies would never find her if she was at sea, lost in or beyond the Gulf Stream and among the swarms of other pleasure craft; but then, just as I felt myself relaxing from the panic that had besieged me, I saw her.

I saw
Addendum.
The big white catamaran lay alongside the very last pontoon. Her name was painted in fake black oversize typescript across the transom of her starboard hull, and she had the forlorn air of abandonment.

The panic returned then, but I told myself there was still hope. There had to be hope, for I could not bear the thought of what I most feared. Perhaps Ellen was still provisioning the boat? I went to the end pontoon, then climbed aboard
Addendum
to discover that no one else had been aboard the big catamaran in days. Litter had blown from the marina’s yard to collect in a leeward corner of her capacious cockpit, while a spider had made a thick white web across the louvres of the padlocked cabin door. A dishrag had been hung to dry from the ensign-hooks on the signal halliard and the dishrag’s folds had stiffened to the consistency of dry chamois leather.