The Far Side of the Sun (9 page)

The sun sat alone in the huge blue sky like a golden eye that refused to blink. It was watching over the systematic ransacking of her home by meticulous men in uniforms and over-polished boots. Dodie retreated into the waves up to her knees, wading the length of the cay, eyes concentrating on the tiny fish that darted between her legs like silver teardrops. When the police had completed whatever it was they had to complete, Detective Calder summoned her back to his patch of sand and reluctantly she left the water.

‘We’ve finished here,’ he said. His manner was official.

She nodded.

‘Thank you,’ he added, ‘for your cooperation.’

She nodded again. His shadow enveloped her and she stepped to one side to escape its weight.

‘Find anything?’ she asked.

‘Nothing definite.’

‘Surely it can’t be so hard for you to find out when Mr Morrell came to Nassau and who he’s been with. It’s only a small island, everyone knows what goes on.’

She halted her words, put an end to them by crushing her hand over her mouth.

The detective dragged his shadow back over her.

‘Miss Wyatt,’ he lowered his head to her height, ‘are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t look all right. A cup of tea might —’

‘Detective Sergeant Calder,’ Dodie said stiffly, ‘what I want is a killer, not a cup of tea.’

‘I assure you that we will do all in our power to track down the person who stabbed Mr Morrell but…⁠’ he paused, his gaze flicking back to her shack, ‘you have given us very little information. Is there anything else you can add?’

Two gold coins. A name on a scrap of paper
.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’

In the silence that followed, she did not let her eyes drop from his. Over his broad shoulder she could see two more uniformed policemen waiting patiently for him. The cry of a black-headed gull as it stalked the water line was the only sound, yet when the detective spoke, he lowered his voice to little more than a murmur and she felt a ripple of concern creep across the patch of soft white sand that divided them.

‘Miss Wyatt, we are dealing with a dangerous person here, a brutal killer who left his victim to bleed to death in an alleyway. I have a team of men examining that alleyway right now, but if they come up with nothing, it will not be an easy task to trace the person who murdered Mr Morrell.’ He drew in a quick frustrated breath. ‘Unless you can help us further.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’

He waited a moment longer, as if he could coax more words from her, and when none came he glanced along the peaceful stretch of beach with a kind of longing on his face, as if peacefulness was not something that intruded often into his busy life. A pair of scarlet macaws swept across his eyeline, trailing their long spindly tails, and he gave a smile, but when he turned back to her it was gone, his official face firmly in place.

‘I see,’ he said, ‘thank you.’ If he still suspected she was the one who wielded the knife, he was disguising it well. ‘I suggest,’ he added, ‘that you avoid back alleyways in future.’

With that comment, Detective Calder walked up the beach and took his shadow with him.

The Arcadia Hotel had started life as a private mansion. With its columned façade and four embellished turrets, it was constructed to be the grandiose home of Sir Archibald Caroll who uprooted his family from Scotland and moved them to Nassau in 1787, when his good friend, the Earl of Dunmore, was appointed Governor of the Bahamas.

That was a period when gracious living blossomed on the island, when many fine houses started to line the streets, all served by retinues of slaves who were hidden away at night in the Over-the-Hill shanties. So keen was the Earl to acquire more servants that he paid a bounty to slave ships bound for America to bring their cargo to the Bahamas instead. Word spread and Europeans took passage to the islands – attracted not only by the enticing climate and beauty of its beaches, but even more by the prospect of easy living and the fortunes to be made out of cotton plantations.

Olive Quinn had transformed the mansion into one of Nassau’s most desirable hotels. She had no time for old stories about the inept Earl of Dunmore, though she did approve of his construction of the two most eccentric forts on the island – Fort Charlotte with its drawbridge and dungeons and Fort Fincastle in the shape of a flat-iron – both packed with 32-pounder cannon to blow any marauding pirate or Spanish ships clean out of the water. That was more her style of doing things.

‘Wyatt, it’s the kitchen for you tonight,’ she declared, eyebrows swooping, the moment Dodie came through the servants’ entrance of the Arcadia. Olive Quinn was an impressive presence. She was solidly built with a sallow skin and hair dyed jet black. It was cut into a short, sharp bob, as neat and precise as her hotel.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Olive. I was detained.’

‘By whom?’

‘By the police.’

‘Well, well, that’s a new one. So what have you been up to, Wyatt?’

Olive Quinn addressed her employees, all of whom were female, by their surnames. Her rules were rigid. Her punishments harsh. Her kindness unconventional. But she had given Dodie a job when no one else in Nassau would touch her. Dodie knew what was coming next, so she headed straight for the big enamel sink, already pushing up her sleeves, ready to face the next five hours up to her elbows in greasy water, scouring pots and pans with baking soda and vinegar. It was Miss Olive’s speciality for tardiness.

‘I found a man on my way home last night. He was hurt. I tried to help but he died.’ She started to shunt the pans around noisily. ‘I told the police about it today but it took much longer than I expected.’ Her back was turned towards the others working in the kitchen. ‘Next time I’ll leave him in the alleyway.’

She heard a moan from Cook, a joyful Bahamian woman who liked to hum hymns while she made bread. She claimed it filled the dough with God’s good grace and made it lighter. Little Minnie, the kitchen dogsbody, uttered a squeak of shock.

‘Two hours at the sink and then she can come up,’ Olive Quinn told Cook.

‘Sure thing, Miss Olive,’ Cook agreed. She liked having Dodie down in her kitchen.

Dodie plunged her hands into the hot water, expecting it to turn bright scarlet as if she hadn’t washed Morrell’s blood off her skin fifty times already. But to her surprise she found Miss Olive’s solid figure standing right behind her.

‘Are you all right, Wyatt?’

‘Yes, Miss Olive.’

There was an awkward pause, during which Dodie’s hands started to scrub the pans with a vigour that was intended to show just how all right she was. For a fleeting moment the woman’s hand rested on her head, offering comfort, but then the warmth of it vanished and Dodie heard the usual snort of impatience.

‘Good.’ Miss Olive’s shoes tapped briskly back to the world of cocktails and glossy smiles that she presented to her guests each evening.

‘Good,’ Dodie echoed under her breath. Life was back to normal.

The only advantage of being a servant was that you heard things. Often things you were not meant to hear. Some people regarded a waitress as a human being as well as a servant, so they were more careful about what they said when you were around. But many saw a waitress as no more than a disembodied hand carrying a tray of glasses, or as a frilly uniform that placed a plate in front of them. Sometimes Dodie wondered if she was made of glass, she was so invisible in the room, but Miss Olive claimed that it proved she was an excellent waitress. It was meant as a compliment but Dodie didn’t see it like that.

The party that evening was loud. American voices from the US Army Air Force contingent boomed across the room, bouncing off mirrors and champagne glasses with many of the men looking handsome in their immaculate dress uniform. With over three thousand service personnel stationed permanently on New Providence, as well as the numerous aircrews who passed through the base for training each month, there was a constant over-supply of men on the island and always an insufficiency of women, which vexed the young bucks.

Dodie entered with a tray of drinks, her hands pink from kitchen duties, and the bright laughter in the room sliced under her skin like slivers of bamboo. She wanted to shout,
Be quiet. A man has died
. But she pulled the polite meaningless smile of a servant on to her face and circulated with the drinks. The masculine smell of cigars and the talk of war dominated the room, as the men crowded around the women like bees, unable to resist the shimmering satins or the fragrance of their languid perfumes. Dodie stood, invisible, at elbows, lingering longer than strictly necessary when she caught a scrap of conversation that interested her.

‘Bomber command is hitting the Ruhr hard in Germany.’

‘I hear that the US Eighth Air Force sent two hundred B-17 aircraft to bombard the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven. That’ll knock the blighters back.’

‘God, I hope so. Their U-boats have been a blasted plague on our Atlantic shipping. Over six hundred tons of Allied ships lost in March, can you believe that? Lost to those filthy Nazi wolf packs.’

Dodie saw the veins in their necks pulse and heard the edge in their voices grow sharper. A woman with diamonds in her hair wept quietly and whispered to her friend, ‘My sister was killed in the terrible bombing of Plymouth.’ She looked as if she did not want to be at the party, but seized a glass from the tray and drank it straight down. Elsewhere Dodie learned that the US Marines were island-hopping in the battle against the Japanese in the Pacific and that the 43rd Infantry under General MacArthur was heading for New Guinea. An attractive young blonde had just come back from seeing
Oklahoma!
on Broadway and an earnest man in glasses was trying to impress her by talking about Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled prose, but he was totally unaware of the sidelong glances she was casting at the Leslie Howard-type across the room.

‘Go get me a bourbon whiskey, girl.’

Dodie turned to the American voice that had delivered the abrupt order. It belonged to the burly man in his sixties who had entered not long ago, head thrust forward, the broad muscles of his chest tense, his eyes sharp as he worked out what was on offer in the gathering. He was no stranger to the Arcadia Hotel and Dodie recognised him immediately. Everyone on the island knew Sir Harry Oakes; he was the owner of the most productive gold mine in the western world up in Canada, as well as of the British Colonial Hotel, the impressive seven-storey building overlooking its own private beach and tennis courts on the edge of Nassau. Purchased, Dodie had heard, in a moment of pique in 1939 when the maître d’ refused him entry because of his usual ragbag of scruffy attire. His first action as the new proprietor was to sack the offending maître d’. A lesson to others.

Nobody crossed Sir Harry and got away with it. Yet in contrast, Dodie heard everywhere of his concern and generosity when it came to his black employees. He was Nassau’s most passionate philanthropist, but one who, after twenty years of living with little more than a bucketful of dirt and a pickaxe for company in his prospecting days, lacked the polished edges of the colonial breed.

‘A bourbon.’

‘Yes, sir.’

She fetched it at once and presented it to him, eyes down. Never look them in the eye. It was one of Olive Quinn’s rules. It made you instantly visible and they didn’t like that. Sir Harry was busy discussing the price of copper with a slight man who had an impatient whine to his voice, but he broke off and addressed Dodie directly as she proffered the drink on her tray.

‘So, young lady,’ Sir Harry took the drink, ‘a busy day, I guess.’

Dodie wasn’t sure what he meant. She flicked her gaze to his face, a high forehead with receding hairline, and a belligerent square jaw. His eyes were those of a man who had done more than most in his life and who valued his privacy, one who hoarded his secrets. She could sympathise with that.

‘Every day is busy,’ she answered with a polite-servant smile.

‘But not every day do you find a body.’

Her throat tightened. ‘I didn’t find a
body
.’

‘Near as damn it, you did, from what I hear.’

‘How did you hear?’

He took a satisfied swig of his neat whiskey. ‘Well, girl, let me tell you, there’s not much goes on in this island that I don’t get to hear about.’

Oh yes, she could believe that. She could feel the force of his will even through the fine fabric of his expensive black evening jacket. She lowered her eyes and started to move away with her tray.

‘Did the guy talk to you?’

‘Who?’

‘The guy you found.’

‘No.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

Across the room a hand wreathed in gold rings was beckoning for another cocktail.

‘That’s not what you told the police, is it?’

She felt heat rising in her chest, but the tray in her hand remained steady, the glasses didn’t rattle, didn’t join in the laughter.
Help me
,
help me
, Morrell’s words hurtled round inside her head. She turned and looked at Sir Harry Oakes once more, and saw that he was studying her intently.

‘I’m sorry, that is a private matter,’ she said.

He rolled a slug of whiskey around his mouth, washing his teeth in it, and nodded. For a moment they both stood staring at each other in silence, indifferent to the wave of noise around them.