The Far Side of the Sun (14 page)

It might be true. But Ella had heard enough. She was well aware of the whispering campaign against the Windsors and where it emanated from. Reggie told her that Wallis Windsor was right in pointing her finger at the palace. ‘But the King shirked his duty by abdicating the throne of England. It was unforgivable,’ Reggie had muttered in an uncharacteristically caustic comment. ‘What did they expect?’

Indeed. What did they expect?

‘You know, ma’am,’ Ella said, ‘it’s not wise to say those things.’

‘Not even to you, my dear Ella.’

‘Especially not to me, ma’am. I can hear Reggie swooning to the floor at my elbow.’

It teased a smile from Wallis and Ella seized the moment to say, ‘I’ve got a question I’d like to ask you.’

Instantly the Duchess’s full attention focused on Ella in that direct way of hers. ‘Fire away.’

‘You have people around you who… well, who keep you in touch with what’s going on here.’

The Duchess slid her a silent smile. It was a well-known fact that the royals had a tight-knit set of informants.

‘So,’ Ella continued, ‘I wondered if you’d heard anything about a man who was killed in the street the night before last.’ Ella tried to keep it casual but failed.

‘Aha, Mrs Sanford. What is this mystery man to you?’

‘Nothing. It’s just that a young woman came to me about it today, but I hadn’t even heard of the tragedy.’

The Duchess exhaled a swirl of smoke that fogged the air between them. ‘You are not a good liar, Ella. I am expert at spotting liars,’ she laughed softly, ‘and expert at lying.’ She waved the smoke away. ‘But I will forgive you that and answer your question. Yes, they were talking about it this morning up at Government House. Colonel Lindop was there as well. I wasn’t really paying attention.’

Ella leaned against the door. She didn’t want anyone coming in now. ‘Do they have any idea who did it?’

‘I think they’re blaming it on the unrest among the workers. They assume it was an expression of native anger. Like the attack on you and Tilly in the car.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are they going to investigate it further?’

‘Of course.’ The Duchess approached slowly, her shoes as silent as a leopard’s paws on the linoleum floor. ‘Now what’s it about? This sudden interest of yours.’

But at that moment, someone barged against the door and Ella leapt aside, allowing Tilly Latcham in her Red Cross uniform to rush into the room. She grinned at Ella, then saw the Duchess and became more muted. She was always less forthcoming around Wallis.

‘Good afternoon, Your Highness. Hello, Ella. Guess what I’ve got.’

‘What?’

‘A bodyguard chauffeur. He’s a policeman.’ Tilly shook her dark hair and let loose a raucous laugh. ‘One who is fat and old and has a forest of nose-hair. Just my luck!’ She turned to Ella. ‘What’s yours like?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I haven’t met him yet.’

‘I hope for your sake he’s a damn sight more fun than mine.’

‘I’m certain he will be,’ the Duchess commented.

Tilly eyed her sharply. ‘And why is that?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not to me, ma’am.’

‘Nor to me,’ Ella smiled.

‘It’s because of your husband, Ella. He’s the one making these decisions.’

Ella could see that Tilly looked suddenly ill-pleased with an undisguised downturn of her crimson mouth. ‘Damn Hector,’ she muttered. ‘Why doesn’t he bother to make sure I get a decent bodyguard?’

‘Don’t be a dunce, Tilly,’ Ella said. ‘Hector cares just as much that you should be safe. I don’t even want a bodyguard.’

‘Come on now, ladies,’ the Duchess laughed. ‘We all know that Reggie will have requested Colonel Lindop’s top man to guard his lovely wife. The quickest, the sharpest, the brightest of the Nassau crop of policemen. So of course he’ll be more fun to be around than some fat hick with nasal undergrowth.’

Tilly sighed dramatically. ‘If I were you, darling, I’d scoot home right now and find out.’

Ella drove home through the rain. It lashed down like bullets, while sudden streaks of lightning ripped open the low-slung clouds. The violence of it snaked across the island, causing Ella to drive faster than she should. She liked storms. As much as dear Reggie loathed them.

Was it true what the Duchess said? That the police were pinning the murder of Morrell on a disgruntled black worker? A convenient scapegoat. It sent a jolt of anger through her that the system could be so easily manipulated by those in control, especially when the one in control was Sir Harry Oakes.

Now, my dear
, he’d said to her the night Morrell died,
you’ve seen things this evening that are best forgotten
. He’d leaned close to her, his head thrust forward like a bull’s, his prospector boots restless as though they could barely restrain themselves from trampling over her. Sir Harry was a bully. A generous and unpredictable man who devoted millions to Bahamian charities. But still a bully. He would physically knock down anyone fool enough to stand in his way.

No need to mention Mr Morrell to anyone
, he’d growled.
I think you understand me, Ella
.

She understood him all right.

And now the girl had come asking questions. Ella yanked the wheel sharply to take a corner and felt the rear wheels slip and squeal as they struggled for grip on the wet road.

Ella parked the car in the garage and made a run for the house. She dashed through the door into the kitchen, shaking rain from her hair and undoing the buttons of her drenched blouse.

‘Emerald, I need a…⁠’

She stopped. Emerald was seated at the table with an expression on her face that belonged on a cat that has just found itself a bowl of cream. In front of her sat two of Ella’s second-best china teacups and a man in a light-weight suit who was eating one of her biscuits. He stood up as soon as Ella entered the room, put down his biscuit and stepped forward. He was tall and muscular, with wavy dark hair and the look of a man who would hold open doors with courtesy but also knew how to slam them in the face of anyone who stepped out of line. It was in the calm grey eyes. In the quiet steady gaze he laid on Ella.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Sanford, I am Detective Sergeant Dan Calder.’

She extended her hand. ‘Good afternoon, Detective Sergeant Calder. I remember you from the police station. I apologise for ruining your jacket. What can I do for you?’

He shook her hand with a firm grip, but there had been a moment’s hesitation and it occurred to Ella that maybe people did not shake a policeman’s hand often. She saw his eyes travel to her buttons and she quickly did them up again.

‘I have been assigned as your bodyguard, Mrs Sanford.’

Her mouth fell open. The Duchess was right. This wasn’t one like Tilly’s, one with nasal hair and a beer gut, this was someone in his early thirties who looked as though he liked to ask too many questions.

‘I assume your husband has informed you that you have been assigned a bodyguard,’ he said.

‘He did, but…⁠’

‘But you don’t want one?’ His mouth smiled, but his eyes remained serious, studying each part of her face as though committing it to memory.

‘I don’t want a policeman in my house.’

‘I understand,’ he replied. ‘I will wait in the garage and keep a watch on the house.’ He started to move past her towards the back door.

‘Miss Ella!’ Emerald’s palm slapped down on the table with a sound like a steam hammer. ‘Mind your manners.’

‘Detective Calder, I didn’t mean that. Finish your tea and biscuit. I just meant that I’m not comfortable with having somebody trailing along behind me all day.’

He should have nodded respectfully, should have said, ‘I quite understand, Mrs Sanford. I will do everything I can to make my presence as unobtrusive as possible.’ Isn’t that what a bodyguard should say? But he didn’t. Instead he looked her directly in the eye and frowned.

‘I am here for your convenience, Mrs Sanford.’ He used her name like a small wedge, hammering it in place between them. ‘I am here to protect you, and for no other reason.’

‘I don’t need protection.’

‘Your husband and Colonel Lindop think you do.’

‘I am not inclined to agree with them.’

‘But they are the ones who are making the decisions in this instance.’

Colour trickled into Ella’s cheeks. How dare he be so rude in her own house?

‘Decisions for you,’ he said. ‘And for me.’ A sudden smile lit up his eyes, taking her by surprise. ‘We are both doing the best we can.’ He ran a hand through his hair, spilling it over his forehead, and the warm intelligence in his eyes brought her back to her senses. She should be grateful to him. Outside, the wind wailed around the verandah, while inside, the only sound came from Emerald crunching on her biscuit.

Ella waved a careless hand. ‘So much silliness,’ she said lightly. Meaning Reggie.

‘They only want to keep you safe.’ He leaned forward a fraction, his suit straining across his broad shoulders. ‘So do I.’

‘It’s your job.’

‘Yes. It’s my job.’

Abruptly she sensed it was not a part of his work that he enjoyed, and who could blame him? Hanging around an idle woman all day when he wanted to be off fighting crime. Maybe he had been removed from a case to do this silly work. That thought made her turn away. She touched her sodden hair and realised she was cold inside her wet blouse. She headed for the door.

‘Hot tea, please, Emerald.’

‘Yes, Miss Ella. Right away. Don’t want you takin’ no chill. Go get out of them wet things.’

First her husband. Now her maid. Both telling her what to do. She thought about her childhood plans to become an intrepid explorer and wondered at the person she had become. Sometimes she felt like a stranger to herself.

Storms pass.

That’s what Dodie told herself. Storms pass. Like the one today which had finally rolled its way south, tracking a path towards Cuba. But behind them storms leave damage. It’s dealing with the damage that is the hardest part.

It’s not worth disrupting the system
.

That’s what the diplomat’s wife said. The words had shaken Dodie. She had liked the woman, liked her warmth, liked her beautiful house and her razor-sharp lawn, liked her orderly desirable life which she inhabited so effortlessly. Dodie had not expected her to put the
system
above a man’s life. It was on her long walk home in the rain that she wished she had told Mrs Sanford that you only care about the system if you are a cog within it. If you are an outsider, a spare part rejected by the system, then you don’t give a damn about it.

‘Need a hand with this?’

The question startled Dodie. She was salvaging what she could from her battered vegetable plot and was pushing what was left of her produce into a sack to take over to Mama Keel. She recognised the American voice at once.

‘Mr Hudson, I’m glad you’ve come back.’ She straightened up, abandoning her sack, and smiled at him. ‘I wanted to thank you for rescuing my mother’s sewing machine.’

‘No need.’

He stepped forward into the sunlight, wearing a clean blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves. The skin of his forearms was pale city skin, but his face had caught the sun and when he smiled back at her, his mahogany-brown eyes seemed to catch the sun as well, warming the dark spaces within them. He approached a tree that the storm had felled and which lay broken-backed across one end of her plot, crushing what remained of the melons.

‘A bad day for melons, I guess,’ he said.

A cigarette hung from his fingers and he expelled smoke lazily while he gestured towards her sack. ‘Can I help?’

She thought about it. She liked the way she didn’t feel the need for haste around this man, as though he slowed time to a crawl with his quiet unhurried manner.

‘Why not?’ she said and tossed him a spade. ‘You can gather the potatoes.’

He inspected the plot’s scorched foliage with a quizzical frown. ‘Where are the potatoes?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Nope.’

‘They’re buried under the soil.’

‘Ah. That explains it.’

She laughed, a light ripple of amusement that expelled something tight and jagged in her chest that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

‘They’re under those mounds of earth over there.’

He set to work while she finished collecting some peppers and a few squash plants that had survived the roasting, shovelling them into her sack. When she glanced back at him he was squatting on his heels, examining a cluster of small potatoes as white as bird’s eggs on the palm of his hand. As she watched, he proceeded to scrub one on his trousers and then lifted it to his mouth. He took a bite and smiled.

Without looking round at her, he asked, ‘What are you doing about a house?’

‘I’m sleeping on a friend’s floor at the moment.’

‘Sounds rough.’

‘It’s better than under the stars with the mosquitoes.’

He laid the potatoes in a pile and moved further down the row. ‘What started the fire?’ he asked.

‘The police think I left the stove on while I was at work.’