Crackdown (30 page)

I dutifully rattled the cabin door, then peered through one of the windows into the vast cabin. It was empty. I went forrard and tried the forehatch, but that was as well secured as the main companion-way. A dry brown palm frond had been blown on to the netting which was rigged between the bows of the twin hulls. I crouched next to a Dorade ventilator box and put my fingers by its vents to feel the whisper of heated air coming from
Addendum
’s stifling interior. I sniffed the air, dreading that I might smell the awful stench of a body left to rot, but the exhausting air was merely musty. Ellen was not here and, so far as I could tell, she had never been here.

I heard a sudden blast of music, and I turned to see a workman wander out of one of the marina sheds. He was a Rastafarian, carrying a vast music box on one shoulder as he half danced and half shuffled his way across the yard.

“Hey!” I shouted at the man.

He stared at me in complete astonishment, as though I was an angel come down from paradise. Then he turned and stared towards the open gate before looking back to me, thus slowly convincing himself that I was real person who had arrived through the gate and not some heaven-sent apparition. “What are you doing, man?”

“Is this the Steinways’ boat?” I was trying to convince myself that there might be two catamarans called
Addendum.

The man switched off the music. “That’s Barry Steinway’s boat. You a friend of his?”

I climbed on to the pontoon and walked slowly towards him. “Have you seen a girl on board
Addendum?
A pretty girl? She should have been here two days ago. She’s got red hair and good legs.”

He grinned at my last words, but shook his dreadlocks. “No, man. I ain’t seen no red girl.” He danced two self-absorbed and silent steps before offering me a toothless grin. “She real pretty?”

I took out a five-dollar bill. “She’s tall,” I said, “and sun-tanned, and she was supposed to be looking after the boat for the Steinways. She was going to sail it to Florida. Has she been here? Have there been any telephone messages for her? Her name’s Ellen.”

“I told you, man! I haven’t seen no girl!”

I gave him the five dollars, which he treated as a paltry reward for his ignorance, then I asked if I could use the telephone in the marina office. He gave me his grudging consent.

I dialled the Maggot. Once again I got the answering machine, but this time I left no message.

Ellen was gone. Jackson Chatterton was dead. Thessy was in his grave. And I was scared.

I hurried to the school where the Literacy Project had its office, and where I found the Project’s secretary to be a tall, light-skinned and grey-haired Bahamian woman who seemed bowed down by her insuperable problems. She introduced herself as Lillian Malleson and, assuming that I had come to talk about her troubles, immediately blamed them all on the television. “We can’t compete with it,” she said despairingly, “why did they ever invent it? That’s what I’d like to know. Why?”

Unable to answer her query, I explained my own; that I was looking for Ellen Skandinsky.

“She was here at the beginning of the week.” Lillian Malleson closed a window against the ear-splitting noise of the children in the school’s dusty playground. “I think it was Monday. She said she’d been on one of the out-islands for the weekend.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

Lillian Malleson frowned at me, almost as if she was noting my presence in her office for the first time. “You’re Nick?”

“Yes.”

“Ellen mentioned you. She likes you. Are you interested in the Project? We do need help.” She crossed the room and tugged open the humidity-swollen door of a tall cupboard, then stared with quiet sorrow at the heaps of reading primers that mouldered on the shelves. “None of them are any good.” She plucked a book at random and held it out for my inspection. “See for yourself.”

She had given me
The Gospel Story Retold for Little Christians,
the cover of which showed a group of golden-haired and blue-eyed children sitting at the feet of a very white-skinned and well-fed Christ. A couple of plump rabbits and a bluebird were also listening to the Gospel message. Lillian took the book from me. “This is supposed to compete with
Miami Vice
or
The Cosby Show?”
She tossed the book back in the cupboard, and brought out another called
Our Furry Friends From Far Australia.
“I think this one was donated by the British High Commission,” she said, “and, if I recall correctly, we’ve got a thousand copies. If you want to know something about koala bears or kangaroos then please feel free to take one of those books away, or even a thousand if you wish.” She went back to her table that was covered with a dreadful litter of letters, books, file cards and ashtrays. In pride of place, at the very centre of the desk’s muddle, was a very modern American telephone with an inbuilt message recorder. Lillian stared at the sleek instrument as though seeking inspiration. “I do remember Ellen saying she was sailing a boat somewhere,” she said suddenly, and reverting to the question I had put to her a few moments before. “Might she have said she was sailing a boat to Florida?”

I already knew that Ellen had not done that. “What about Great Inagua,” I asked instead. “Wasn’t she thinking of doing some work for you on Great Inagua? Perhaps that’s where she is?”

“I’m sure she’s not.” Lillian shook a cigarette from a packet. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said tiredly, “but my husband’s a doctor, and he does, and I think if Freeman can smoke, why can’t I? It isn’t a fair world when you think about it, is it?”

“Did someone else go to Great Inagua instead of Ellen?” I asked, but only after agreeing that it was not, indeed, a fair world.

“No one.” She lit her cigarette. “We didn’t have the money for the fare, you see. The salt company on the island offered to pay all our costs, but I’m not entirely sure I replied to their letter. Do you think I should write and remind them of their offer?” she asked me with great seriousness.

“Oh, yes,” I said with equal seriousness, “I think you should.” I paused. “Perhaps Ellen went with her own money?”

Lillian shook her head. “She didn’t take the questionnaire if she did, and there’s not much point in going there without the questionnaire. At least, I don’t think she took the questionnaire.” She went to an antique filing cabinet and dragged out a broken drawer. She puffed smoke as she hunted through the chaos of papers, while I looked round the lizard-haunted walls which were smothered with posters designed to teach the alphabet; ‘O is for Oliver, Asking for More, while P is for Puffer-Train, Making a Roar’; then Lillian found the Great Inagua file and mutely showed me that the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation Standard Literacy Attainment Questionnaire, English Language Edition, Number 34, published 1961, To Be Filled In With Indelible Ink ONLY, was still in the file. “It’s the only copy of the form that we have,” she said, “so Ellen can’t have taken another.”

I stared out of the window. Small children were swinging from a climbing frame that was thick with rust. “She’s disappeared, you see,” I explained bleakly.

Lillian’s shrug seemed to suggest that these things happened and that it was foolish to seek any explanation.

“If you see her,” I said, “would you please tell her to phone John Maggovertski?” I wrote down the Maggot’s telephone number, but I had a feeling that I was wasting my time, or perhaps it was just that I had been infected with the general air of hopelessness that pervaded the Literacy Project.

I asked if I could use the Project’s phone to make a local call, because I wanted to see if the Maggot had reached home, but it seemed the telephone was not working. “They sent an engineer last week,” Lillian Malleson said, “and he said this telephone is too modern.”

“So get another telephone?” I suggested.

“It was donated.” She stared at the splendid instrument. “It seems that it can be adapted to the system, but...” Her voice tailed away.

“The engineer couldn’t read the instructions?” I hazarded a guess.

She blinked at me. “If I see Ellen,” she said instead of answering me, “I’ll ask her to phone you.”

I thanked her, then went out into the playground of shrieking children. Ellen was gone.

Ellen was gone, but all I could do was go on looking for her. I could find no taxis near the school so I caught a bus that dropped me near the Straw Market, and I ran through the alleys and into the courtyard and up the stairs to Ellen’s small apartment. I thumped on her door.

There was no answer. A child cried across the courtyard and a goat bleated at the foot of the staircase. A woman screamed at a child, a dog howled in pain, and in the street a truck’s brakes hissed like an attacking puff-adder. The televisions in the various apartments were mostly tuned to an American talk show on which chainsaw-voiced women were screaming their opinions about the desirability of geriatric sex.

I kicked at Ellen’s door and only succeeded in chipping away some loose flakes of yellow paint.

I looked under the broken piece of balustrade where Ellen kept her spare key, but the key was not there, so instead I tried to break down her door. The flimsy lock proved unexpectedly resilient and I bruised my right foot as I kicked and kicked again, but at last the lock broke and the door swung open.

I need not have bothered, for Ellen was long gone. Her bed was empty, her bathroom was empty, and there was nowhere else in the tiny flat to search for her. “Hell,” I said. The room was as untidy as ever, so I could not tell if anyone else had searched it, but it did not look as though there had been any kind of struggle in the room for the bed was made neatly enough and nothing had been overturned or spilt. Her father’s crucifix hung black and still against the wall through which the sounds of the neighbouring apartment came de-pressingly clearly. A plant on Ellen’s table was desperate for water and I fetched a glass from the bathroom. A cockroach scuttled across the floor and I slammed down my heel and squashed it with a lucky hit.

I looked in cupboards and drawers, not really certain what I was searching for, but unwilling just to stand in the room and give way to the threatening despair. I found a letter from Ellen’s mother in Rhode Island and I copied down the telephone number in the sudden hope that Ellen might have gone home.

I felt a flicker of hope because I found none of her precious writer’s notebooks, but that really meant nothing; Lillian Malleson had already confirmed to me that Ellen had done what she had told me she was going to do; namely fly to Freeport, collect her baggage from this apartment, say goodbye to the Literacy Project, then sail away. Except she had never reached the marina.

The despair was creeping up on me. I badly needed to talk to the Maggot. I turned in the tiny space of Ellen’s apartment, seeking any clue as to what might have happened to her, and finding none. I kicked at one of the boxes of African literacy leaflets in my frustration and the violence of the motion dislodged the gun from my waistband. It clattered harmlessly to the floor.

Ellen’s neighbour, a man who worked a night shift as a cashier at one of the island’s casinos, had been disturbed by the noise I had made breaking down Ellen’s door, and now came to see just what or who had caused that commotion. He arrived as I was picking up the gun from Ellen’s straw matting and, seeing the weapon, he backed sharply away and made noises as though he was trying to restrain a horse. “Whoa! Whoa! It’s OK, I ain’t curious! Not me! You just break in, don’t you care about me, man! I ain’t curious, oh no!”

“It’s OK!” I ran on to the balcony that connected the small apartments and tried to placate him. “I’m just looking for Ellen. I’m her English friend, Nick.”

I was not sure he believed me. Certainly the glimpse of the evil-looking gun had unnerved him. He raised his hands to ward me off. “I ain’t seen Ellen for days, man! Not for days! It ain’t my business. That’s what I told the other gentlemen.”

“What other gentlemen?” I had pursued the casino cashier almost into his apartment.

“Just people! They were here last week.”

“White people? Hispanic? Blacks?”

“All sorts, man, all sorts. I don’t know who they are, and I can’t tell you more!” The cashier had backed inside his tiny apartment where a television flickered. I caught a glimpse of a girl’s dark and naked legs curled on a sheet printed with a tiger-skin pattern, then the cashier slammed the door in my face. “You go away!” He shouted through the door as he slammed its bolts shut. “Go away!” I heard the girl asking questions, but the cashier was more concerned with getting rid of me. “Go away!” he shouted again, his voice shrill with fear, “just go away!”

I went away. I suspected that the visitors the cashier had described were McIllvanney and Bellybutton. McIllvanney, after all, had already told me that he had visited Ellen’s flat.

I went into the street and used some of the money I had cashed that morning to buy a hasp, a padlock, eight screws and a screwdriver, then I went back to Ellen’s apartment and, after leaving her a note apologising for the mess I had caused and begging her to telephone the Maggot if she came home, I made good the damage I had caused. I scribbled another note for the cashier next door, apologising for scaring him, and asking him to leave a message at John Maggovertski’s number if he heard any news of Ellen. I wrote down the Maggot’s phone number and address, and added that I hoped to be at that address later that day. I hid the padlock’s key in the place where Ellen normally hid her own spare key. The casino cashier watched me through a crack in his curtains, but pretended not to be home when I knocked on his window, so I slid the message under his door and left him to the girl on his bed and the harridans on his television.

I needed a telephone. The public phone just outside Ellen’s apartment block had been used as a public urinal, and its handset torn away, so I walked down to the waterfront, then along to McIllvanney’s yard.

“I’m supposed to call the police and have you thrown out,” Stella greeted me cheerfully, “but do you want your mail and a cup of tea first?”