Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 6, June 1992

A Stranger Comes to the Village by Gregor Robinson

As it happened, I was the first to set eyes on the stranger. There were actually four of them, but three of the visitors were young and goodlooking, upper middle class by looks and diction, the sort of people we were used to seeing in the islands, so we didn’t call them strangers. We called only the older man the stranger. We called him that even after he was dead and we knew his name perfectly well, when he had ceased to be a source of conversation and speculation.

I looked out the window of the bank one morning, through the lemon-light of the frangipani leaves, and saw the boat drop anchor. I heard the splash, the playing out of the chain across the still water. This was May; the yachts from the Carolinas and New England would not be back until fall, and the basin was almost empty. His boat was an old motor-sailor with a high cabin house. The woodwork was battleship grey. The sail was wrapped around the boom in mottled lumps.

As I watched, a ladder was dropped over the side to a wooden tender that bumped along the port side. Three people descended — early twenties, two men and a woman. The woman and one of the men were blond — big, blond, and healthy, the type you see in beer advertisements but who are almost unbelievable in real life. The other person was dark and thin. He looked more like a boy than a man, yet he was the leader; he hurried the others along. They set off in the tender, quickly rowing the short distance to the pier. They were eager to be ashore.

When they reached the pier, the dark man spoke to Ti-Paul, one of the Haitians waiting there for the noon ferry to come in. Cigarettes changed hands, no doubt illegal ones, for drugs were a kind of currency in the islands, and an arrangement was made: the three hoisted their packs onto their shoulders and strolled down the dusty road between the pale casuarinas and the towering royal palms, away from the village. Ti-Paul attached the tender to his outboard and towed it back out to the motor-sailor. He called up, then threw the line to the tall figure with wild hair who had come up from below decks.

That was my first sight of the stranger. Six weeks later he lay dead in one of the back rooms of the Majestic Hotel, shot with a .32 caliber bullet, and Constable MacMahon standing behind me in his stout regulation shoes, asking whether I knew of anyone who owned such a weapon.

I knew Tom Hargreaves owned such a gun, bought secondhand in Miami, after a run-in with some drugrunners near More’s Island. It was a small Browning automatic, 32 caliber, with a nickel handle — a classic apparently, almost a collector’s item. He showed it to me once — several months before that awkward moment with Constable MacMahon in the room at the back of the Majestic Hotel. Hargreaves had been polishing the thing, and the smell of oil had filled the house, forcing Mary Hargreaves, who hated the sea breeze, to throw the windows open wide.

In the Bahamas bankers are known for their discretion: the law provides for it; it is the reason people like the Hargreaveses settle here. Tom Hargreaves was my largest legitimate customer — by which I mean his money did not come from the cocaine trade; if I lost him as a client, they would close the bank and I would have to return to grey Montreal. A delicate situation, I think you will agree. But let me return to the events that led up to that moment.

At twelve thirty the morning the visitors arrived, Ti-Paul came into the bank with the cash receipts from the ferry. He told me that the young people had hitched a ride with the stranger from Green Turtle Cay, half a day’s sail away across the Sea of Abaco.

“I think they be here for a while, man,” he said as I filled out the deposit book. “The girl, she been real seasick, even just coming over from Turtle Cay. She said she not going on any boat again — not for a long time.”

By sunset I knew that they had set up camp down the beach on the Atlantic side, past Annie’s Place, at the end of the reef. News travels fast on Pigeon Cay. It was actually Tom Hargreaves himself who told me where they were camped; he had been out in his jeep, and he had seen them turn off the road and take the short trail between the scrubby dunes to the beach. I wondered if he had noticed her then, the blonde girl. Her name was Harriet Jones. She was from Elmira, New York. I learned this for the simplest of reasons: one day she came into the bank to cash a traveler’s check.

“You cashing only a hundred bucks?” said the dark boy who accompanied her, the one I had come to think of as their leader. There was the smell of marijuana about them.

“It’s all I have left,” the girl said. They looked at one another. The boy watched intently as Winnie counted out the bills. I could see that they were running out of money.

“Any place we can go fishing around here?” the boy asked. “Dive for conch, maybe catch some lobster?”

I told them that the lobster fishery was strictly regulated, that conch was in deeper waters at this time of year. They ought to talk to Mrs. Rainey. Her husband sometimes took visitors out to sea with him, for a small fee. The boy thanked me for the information. He struck me as very intense.

The only other time I saw them was from Tom Hargreaves’ deck. I dropped over with some papers for him to sign, investment certificates, and he asked me in for a drink. We stood on the broad wooden deck facing the Atlantic. The young people had moved closer to the village and were now camped in front of the old graveyard just to the south of Hargreaves’ house. They had built a lean-to of driftwood, silverwood branches, and palm leaves.

“That’s only for their food and pack, a little shelter if it rains,” said Hargreaves. “They live and sleep in the open, under the sky.” He sounded wistful as he told me this.

One day he had gone to speak to them, he told me, to ask that they be careful of sparks carried by the wind to the dry grass behind the beach. He showed them how to make a banked fire, something he had learned thirty-five years before, in his own youth, at summer camp in Maine. There was a pair of binoculars on the table next to where we sat, U.S. government issue. It was clear that he had made a study of their habits.

Tom Hargreaves was fifty-six years old. He had been retired from the foreign service for three years. He had a sunburned forehead, a nervous wife, a past about which he was vague — he was supposed to have been in U.S. intelligence. He was a big man, and he was still handsome, though you seldom noticed it because his restlessness was a distraction.

When Mary went into the house to see about the dinner, he handed me the binoculars. He said, “Take a look if you like.” But I could see the young people from where we were even without the binoculars. It was a warm night. They were body surfing. They were nude.

“Can’t they see us from down there?” I said. Tom Hargreaves was wearing a large straw hat to protect his scaly forehead from the sun. It was a hat he often wore, and I knew it would be visible from much farther down the beach than their campfire.

“Sun’s behind us now, we’re in the shadows,” he said. He had become shifty-eyed. He avoided my gaze. I felt rather furtive myself.

The woman, Harriet Jones, strode from the water. She reached up and ran her hands along the sides of her head, squeezing the sea water from her long hair. She was looking towards the sunset, and I thought she must have noticed Tom and me watching as she entered the lean-to. The boys wrapped towels around themselves and began the business of setting the fire.

There was a bustling behind us, the clink of ice, Tom Hargreaves coughing. Mary had returned. Hargreaves harrumphed, began to talk. He said he thought they might be drug couriers — terrible people, ruining the place, ought to get the Defence Force after them. The truth was that we often saw people like these traveling through the islands, especially in the summer. They came down for weeks, sometimes months on end. They slept on the beaches and spent their days lolling beneath the palms. Some stayed until winter and found jobs in the restaurants and resort hotels. I thought Tom was being overly romantic in assigning them the role of drug couriers. Or perhaps he was being devious. Mary said nothing.

I expected the stranger to drop in at the bank, too — most visitors do, if not for money then at least to make themselves known, for government is scarce in the islands and the bank often serves as a kind of unofficial consulate — but he never came. Still, because of my vantage point overlooking the harbor, I saw more of him than anybody else. I saw him working on the deck of his boat, rowing ashore to buy his simple needs in the village (frozen bread, longlife milk, butter, instant coffee, a bag of sugar: there are no secrets in the village), walking along the broad sidewalk that was the Queen’s Highway with his loping stride, or strolling along the edge of the surf. He seemed to find the beach irresistible. That was something I could understand, from when I had first arrived on Pigeon Cay a year before. Day after day you found yourself walking along that infinite white curve, the waves breaking and foaming, the rush of the wind through the sea grapes, the sun and the salt breeze warm on your skin. There was an almost hypnotic allure.

For the stranger it seemed to be more than that. It was as though he was looking for something. As we found out later, he was looking for the girl.

A few mornings after he arrived, I threw open the shutters and saw that his boat was gone. He had left these waters, probably for Eleuthera and the southern Caribbean, I thought. But the next morning the boat was back at the mooring. Sometimes the stranger was back and gone the same day. There was one other peculiar thing: the stranger lived on that boat, yet he had taken the room at the Majestic, one of the cheap ones at the back.

“Does he use it much?” Hargreaves asked Madame Grumbacher. This was perhaps ten days after the stranger had arrived. I was buying Hargreaves lunch at the Terrace Bar of the Majestic. He had been among my first and was still among my biggest private customers. His wife was old money, and Tom owned rental properties throughout the Caribbean. I treated people like the Hargreaveses well.

“You should know better than to ask me that,” said Madame Grumbacher, her voice booming. She had been in the islands for twenty years, yet she still spoke with a strong German accent. “We innkeepers must be discreet — just like bankers.” She grinned and winked.

Mary Hargreaves, a look of disapproval on her face, sat across the table from us, waiting. At the Yacht Club, it was well known that she thought Tom drank too much. Mary dabbed at her forehead with a pink handkerchief. Her movements were jerky, like a little bird’s.

Baggy white pants, no shirt, no shoes. He would have been about forty. He had fine features. Despite the unkempt hair, the shadow of his unshaven face, and the weathered skin, he was goodlooking; you could see that even in death. I was feeling rather queasy. It was not something they covered at the London School of Economics, how to view dead bodies. I had been sent for because by then it was well known that I was the village authority on the stranger.

The room was filled with rancid air from the kitchen exhaust vents below the window. “That him?” said Constable MacMahon. He was the island’s only policeman. He was very large. Together with Dr. Cutter and the dead stranger, we filled the room.

“It’s him,” I said.

He had been shot no more than five hours before, according to Dr. Cutter, around noon, when the village was at its busiest and the freight boat was unloading and the big fans from the hotel kitchens were spinning full blast. No one had heard a thing. His name was Ainsley; MacMahon determined this by going through the man’s wallet. There was some U.S. and Bahamian currency in the top drawer of the dresser, about five hundred U.S. altogether. The cash, the boat that was in and out of the harbor, this room which might serve as a business venue for nervous customers: it appeared as though the stranger was in the drug trade.

“Right,” said Constable MacMahon, “now I search the boat.”

He was all business; things were proceeding as though we had a drug shooting on our hands, rare on Pigeon Cay but not so uncommon on some of the other islands. For Constable MacMahon, it would be a solution. For me there was the matter of the gun.

Mary Hargreaves did not like unannounced visits. Even though I had my briefcase and the pretext of business, she was reluctant to ask me in. She was more damp-eyed and fluttery than usual. When she finally opened the door to let me pass, I saw why. The house had been ransacked. Two of the large front windows had been smashed. Furniture was overturned, books pulled from the shelves, food from the pantry and refrigerator strewn across the stone floors and grey carpets. The house smelled of liquor; bottles had been smashed against the walls.

Tom Hargreaves had been fishing; Mary had left early to do the weekly shopping across the channel. They had returned to find this.

“Who do you think it was?” I asked.

I thought Mary was about to answer when Hargreaves came from behind and interrupted. “No idea,” he said.

“Did they take anything?”

“Not that I can see,” he said. He was brusque. I thought perhaps there was something he wasn’t telling me. When Mary left the room, I asked again, “Is anything missing?”

He stared at me in a kind of trance but said nothing. I told him that the stranger was dead in his room in the Majestic Hotel. Shot with a .32 caliber bullet. “You must tell the police about this,” I said, sweeping my hand across the debris of the living room.

“Why?” said Hargreaves.

“Because otherwise they will think you killed the stranger.”

“Constable MacMahon does not know that I own a .32 caliber pistol. Unless you told him. So no one will think anything.”

I was a banker and discreet by nature. It was unlikely that Hargreaves was a murderer. But how can you ever be sure?

When I left the house, Hargreaves walked me up the path: he wanted a word in private, away from Mary. He stopped by the gate and took my elbow.

“The girl, you know, on the beach, I understand she cashed some sort of traveler’s check?” I was surprised he knew about that. I nodded. Hargreaves removed his straw hat, scratched his forehead. “You know her name then, where she is from and so on?” I nodded again.

Tom said, “David, you and I are friends. I am your customer. I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention any of those details — about the girl, I mean — to Constable MacMahon, should he ask.”

“Speak of the devil,” I said, looking over Hargreaves’ shoulder. Constable MacMahon came clopping along the sidewalk. Hargreaves’ grip on my elbow tightened, but Constable MacMahon had not come to see him. He was on his way to the beach, to the campsite of the young people. I offered to accompany him.

It seemed that the stranger was indeed a dealer, small time — “I found a few packets of the stuff on the boat, all neatly done up in plastic the way they do for the tourists,” Constable MacMahon told me — but the theory of the room at the Majestic as a place for drug transactions was falling apart. No one had visited the stranger there (Madame Grumbacher confirmed this), and there were no drugs in the room. All the same, MacMahon was determined to stick to the drug business; it got him off the hook.

We reached the end of the Queen’s Highway and turned left towards the beach and the sound of the surf. As we walked through the old cemetery to the beach, I noticed a solitary figure watching us from Hargreaves’ deck. Tom or Mary? I couldn’t say.

They must have left in a hurry, for the fire pit was still warm. While MacMahon sifted through the ashes, I strolled up the bank behind the campsite. Here beneath the brambles and sea grapes I spotted Hargreaves’ binoculars, smashed and encrusted with white salt blotches of sea water. They must have thrown them up here from the beach.

“Find anything?” said Constable MacMahon.

“No,” I said, for I had made my decision to protect Hargreaves.

But Constable MacMahon discovered that Hargreaves had owned a .32 without my help, and he learned about the break-in, too. The gun itself was never found — not surprising with the Atlantic Ocean and the Sea of Abaco all around us. As for the young people, the very day the body was found Ti-Paul ferried them across the channel, where they had taken the plane to Fort Lauderdale. Their money problems had apparently been resolved.

“They stole the gun from Mr. Hargreaves, you see,” said Constable MacMahon. We were sitting at the bar of the Majestic; Constable MacMahon was telling how he had solved the mystery. “I don’t think he had in mind to use it at first. They were up there to teach Mr. Hargreaves a little lesson.” It was something everyone in the village knew by now, that Hargreaves had been watching the girl through his binoculars. He kept watching her even after the two boys had warned him, Constable MacMahon told us, until finally they came and ransacked the place. They took the binoculars (and destroyed them, as I had discovered that day on the beach). And they took the gun.

“How did you know all this — that Hargreaves had a gun, that these people stole it?” asked Burnett.

“Ah, now there is something I cannot tell you, sir. We must protect our sources.” Constable MacMahon took a noisy gulp of his beer. He continued.

“As for the murder, it was the same old story, I believe you would call it. The eternal triangle. The boy — the dark one — he must have seen them together, on the beach perhaps, probably that morning. The Haitians in the bush — some of them had seen her with an older fellow several times, they said. The boy had Mr. Hargreaves’ gun to hand — I say he killed the stranger because he and the girl were having it off.”

Having it off, that was Constable MacMahon’s term. He had talked to Ti-Paul and to others in the islands where the stranger’s boat had been, and it was true: the man had been pursuing the girl. He was a smalltime drug dealer all right, but that had nothing to do with his return visits to Pigeon Cay.

“The girl was prone to seasickness,” MacMahon told us. “She had vowed to stay off boats. That’s why the stranger took the room, a place for them to go to, like.”

“Have another beer, constable,” said Burnett.

“Thank you, sir, I believe I will,” said Constable MacMahon. “As for poor Mr. Hargreaves, he was right. She was mad at him, was Mary — his watching the girl, getting them involved in all this. I hear she is leaving him. Leastways for awhile.”

We stared at him in silence. This was a surprise. But the biggest surprise for me came a few days later. Mary Hargreaves came into the bank. She wanted to look after some loose ends, she said, for she was leaving the island — for good. There would no longer be a joint account. The Hargreaveses were having more of a parting than we had imagined.

Mary went carefully over the records. Something caught her eye — a couple of recent transactions, rather large checks made out to cash.

“Ah, you see!” she said. She was bright-eyed. She was almost shouting. I had never seen her like this. “He even gave her money, the bastard!”

Then I knew who had tipped MacMahon off about the gun. Hargreaves must have thought until the end that she hadn’t known. But wives always know. The dark boy had shot the wrong man. It was not the stranger who had been seeing the girl. It was old Tom Hargreaves.