The Far Side of the Sun (30 page)

‘Yes. You sound like one of Mama Keel’s stray dogs, all stiff legs and hackles raised.’

Did he? He knew how to wear a blank mask, how to give nothing away by even the twitch of an eyelid. Often his life had depended on it. But with her he was transparent and it unnerved him. Yet in an odd way it gave him a sense of release. The freedom to let go of everything else and just love her. He lowered his head and kissed her shoulder. It tasted of strange herbs.

‘You must rest now and let your back heal.’ He headed for the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To see a man.’

‘What man?’

‘Dodie,’ he said calmly, so that she wouldn’t know what it cost him, ‘I want you to leave this island.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Dodie. I’m going to arrange a boat.’

‘No.’

‘It’ll be safer.’

‘Safer for me. Not for you.’

‘You must go. I’ll stay. I gave my word to find Johnnie Morrell’s killer and I don’t go back on my word.’

‘Neither do I, Flynn.’

He knew she would never leave till this was over.

‘Together,’ she told him. ‘We do this together. And then we leave.’

The rain had stopped. The sky was a sullen gunmetal grey that robbed the dingy bar of what little light it possessed. But Flynn knew that the sun would put in an appearance in an hour or two. He was growing used to the rhythms here, to the heat and the brilliance of life on the island, very different from Chicago with its air so grey and so brittle it broke in his mouth.

Spencer was there in the bar waiting for him, his narrow face tense, a well-used glass of scotch in front of him. He had been curt on the phone when Flynn rang his office. Neither had mentioned Flynn’s intrusion into his bedroom or his removal of Spencer’s gun at knifepoint.

‘What the hell are you still doing here?’

‘Real nice to see you too, Spencer,’ Flynn grimaced as he sat down and signalled for a beer. ‘I told you before, I will leave when I’m ready and not before. And until then, I could use some answers from you.’

‘Go to hell.’ Spencer stood up. ‘Or more to the point, go to Miami. I only came to deliver this message: Lansky wants to speak to you.’ He relished the threat implied in those words. Meyer Lansky too often did his speaking with a snubnosed .38 special.

Flynn took a long drag on his cigarette and knew Spencer was not going to walk away. The beer arrived and he clinked his glass against the abandoned whisky tumbler.

‘Happy days,’ he said.

He’d knocked back his beer and followed it with what was left of the scotch before Spencer put both his hands on the greasy table and leaned over it.

‘What the fuck are you playing at, Hudson?’

‘This isn’t a game.’ Flynn tipped his chair back. ‘Don’t for one minute think I’m playing. I intend to find whoever killed Morrell.’

‘Don’t be a bloody fool. Forget Morrell. Get out of Nassau before —’

‘Before what?’

‘Before things get worse.’

‘Is that a threat?’

Spencer sat down. ‘Just stay away from me. I don’t want scum like you anywhere near my house and don’t even think of breathing the same air as my wife again.’

Flynn recalled the dark-haired woman asleep in the bed and wondered how wised-up she was on what her husband was up to with the mob. This was a guy who didn’t like to get his nice clean cuffs dirty and sorted out his problems by using muscle like the two meatheads who had attacked Dodie. For that alone Spencer was lucky not to find his arms bending in the wrong directions, but right now Flynn needed this guy. He was the bridge. One foot in with the mob and one foot in the limey colonial camp in Nassau. So Flynn let his chair drop back to all four feet on the floor with a clatter that made Spencer jump back and his eyes widen warily.

‘I went to see Harold Christie today,’ Flynn said in a tone that implied more. ‘We chewed the fat awhile.’

Spencer reacted by becoming very still. Not a muscle moved.

‘He peddled me a story about a prostitute putting the knife in Morrell,’ Flynn informed him. ‘Know anything about that?’

‘It’s a rumour going around. It could be true.’

‘It could just as likely be true that one of your hoods did the job for you.’

‘No, Hudson, don’t be a bloody idiot. Whether we like it or not, you and I work for the same side.’

‘Okay, Spencer, so tell me who is on the other side. Who is it who had something to gain from Morrell’s death? You?’

‘No.’

‘Sir Harry Oakes?’

‘Christ alive, you are poking a stick into a snakepit if you go about saying that.’

Flynn mentally sharpened his stick. ‘What’s so special about this deal? Everyone knows Oakes owns half the island. So what the hell is it that is getting everyone so riled up about this?’

Spencer went for his glass and pushed it aside with annoyance when he found it empty. ‘Go back to Miami, Hudson. Keep your nose out of Lansky’s business.’

A shout came from across the bar where two black guys in dungarees were bickering over a game of cards and it drew Spencer’s attention. He turned his head and in that unguarded moment Flynn saw the pulse in his neck below his jaw. It was racing like a cat out of hell. This man was scared. But of what? Of Oakes? Or Lansky? Or of something in his own shadow?

Flynn lit himself another cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs to smother the questions he wanted to hurl on the table. Instead he asked only one. ‘What happened to the money on Morrell? The police are looking for a wallet.’

The mention of the police got a reaction.

Spencer bared his bad teeth at Flynn. ‘How the fuck do I know what happened to the wallet? For all I know, you pocketed it yourself.’

Flynn flicked his cigarette to the floor and stamped on it. The other guys in the bar were keeping their eyes to themselves as they talked to each other in their deep voices and slipped a fold of ganja weed from one hand to another. They avoided the two white men in their midst as if they were invisible. Flynn reached across the table, seized the front of Spencer’s sweaty shirt and yanked him forward hard against the table.

‘Last question, buddy. What’s the name of the factory where the girl used to work?’

Spencer’s narrow eyes doubled in size. His hand gripped Flynn’s wrist, trying to release his shirt. But suddenly understanding hit him and with a great whoop of breath, he started to laugh.

As a picnic, it was a failure. As a moment of fracturing Ella’s life, it was a resounding success.

So much so, that she became convinced someone else had crawled under her skin when her head was turned. What else could explain the stranger she found inside her bones who did things and uttered words that would make any happily married woman blush?

Her hand slid into his waistband. ‘Let me touch you,’ she’d whispered in his ear.

Shameful, shameful things.

It had started well. Ella was happy and talkative, relaxing in the car with the windows down as Dan drove inland. There were only narrow dust-laden roads that wound like coral ribbons between the overhanging trees, empty except for an occasional donkey cart or a couple of women sashaying along in bright dresses with boxes of limes or melons perched on their heads. No habitation. Just the wild bush with its vivid green scrubland punctuated by dense coppices of pine trees and strong flamboyant palms of all shapes and sizes that fanned out their fronds against sapphire-blue skies.

It felt private. Away from all houses, far from the people of Nassau and their relentless wagging tongues. Was that what did it? Was that what gave her such a sense of freedom and release? Or was it Dan? The way he seemed unfettered. His elbow on the window ledge, the wind clutching at his hair. He must have been to the barber’s early that morning because there were tiny snippets of hair on the white collar of his open-necked shirt and the skin behind his ear gleamed pink in the sunlight.

Today there seemed to be no barrier between them and he made her laugh when he sang back to a mockingbird that seemed to be serenading them. She liked to laugh with him. They sang all the words of ‘London Pride’ together, his strong bass voice rolling alongside hers, and it felt good.

Dan knew the tracks and trails well, which ones he could squeeze a car down and which ones he couldn’t. The bushland stretched out around them, dense and secretive, full of sounds and smells that were unfamiliar to Ella, as she had never ventured this deep before. It felt wild to her. Trees spread their heavy branches further, bushes were speckled with red berries that glittered like jewels in the sun, and the undergrowth of ferns and prickly vegetation rustled with the sounds of small unseen animals.

‘Are there snakes here?’ Ella asked suddenly.

He laughed at her expression. ‘Yes, but no poisonous ones.’

When finally he selected a shaded spot under a grove of pine trees to lay out their picnic rug and spread Emerald’s array of fancy cakes and sandwiches around them, Ella felt as though she had a champagne bubble of happiness caught in her throat.

She couldn’t eat. Not with that bubble lodged in her throat. She was frightened that if she did it would burst, so she just drank the wine and smoked one of Dan’s cigarettes, warm from his pocket. But she watched him. Her eyes feasted on the relish with which he sank his teeth into Emerald’s blueberry pie, the purple juice trickling on to his chin, and she was shocked by the strength of her desire to lick it off.

So she lay back on the rug, forcing her eyes to stare at the sky instead of at him, seeing the clouds start to roll in from the west, feeling the lightness in her limbs and the slow contented beat of her heart. When a black ball of mosquitoes chose to hover over her face, she couldn’t even rouse herself to swat them away, but Dan’s large hand swept back and forth, defeating them.

‘You don’t want them biting you,’ he said, smiling.

Was it her imagination or did he put an emphasis on ‘them’? As if she might want something else biting her. Or someone else. But a sudden sense of stepping too far over the line of what was decent made her close her eyes. Denying them the pleasure of gazing at him, at the way his hair sprang from his temples, at the large collarbones that edged into view above his shirt. She could sit a peach on his collarbones. Above all she denied her eyes their desire to watch his hands. To imagine what they could do.

‘Are you asleep?’

She smiled and rolled her head languidly from side to side. ‘Not yet.’

She heard his teeth bite into an apple. Quietly he started to tell her about his work. About the black women who slunk into the police station with swollen faces and cut lips on a Friday night, which was payday. Payday meant rum-swilling. He told her about the lost dogs, the drunks, the petty thefts, the spats between neighbours, the traffic accidents, about the fair but disciplined attitude of his boss, Colonel Lindop, but at no time did he mention the murder. The large numbers of military personnel now on the island had brought an inevitable increase in his work, but he spoke about it with a sense of commitment that pleased her.

At one point he rested a hand on her leg, on her bare shin. Casually, as though he scarcely noticed. She made herself breathe quietly. And when he removed his hand to flick away another mosquito invasion, she kept her eyes firmly closed, so that he would not see what that did to her. That was why she didn’t catch sight of the clouds turning grey or notice when the horizon flattened to a dull backdrop where the trees around her rose in black-edged silhouettes. When the rain hit, it was like pennies hurled at her face.

‘Ella!’ Dan shouted and pulled her to her feet. ‘Run!’

Ella
. He called her
Ella
. She started to laugh as she dashed through the rain.

He darted to the shelter of the nearest tree, dragging her with him, because the car stood fifty yards away up a track. But already they were soaked to the skin. Lightning forked through the sky, slashing it apart, and they huddled against the slick trunk where Dan held her close, as if he feared the horizontal force of the rain would wash her away.

She wasn’t sure which came first. Afterwards she tried to remember but couldn’t. Her fingers sliding between the buttons of his sodden shirt or his hand cradling the back of her head and drawing her to him. It didn’t matter. His lips came down fiercely on hers, his breath hot on her wet face, and something streaked through her that felt like red-hot wires. Burning her flesh, scorching the soft skin of her thighs until the throbbing between them was relentless.

‘Hush,’ he murmured and kissed the rain off her eyelids. He ran his palm over her lips, reshaping them. ‘Hush,’ he said again and only then did she realise she was hauling air in and out of her lungs with the sound of bellows, stoking the fire that was raging inside her. He stripped off her blouse and licked the rain off her nipples until she slid her hand inside his waistband and whispered, ‘Let me touch you.’

She undid his button flies and touched him, held him, caressed him in ways she had never caressed Reggie. Dan peeled off their clothes until they were both naked in the stinging rain and he took her, standing up against the tree, her back raked by the bark as he thrust inside her. It wasn’t gentle. She didn’t want it gentle. It was a rough ravenous seizing of her body. He opened her up and filled all the cold and empty spaces inside her with a heat that burned right through her.