Crackdown

PART THREE

The mourners were still singing in Bonefish’s yard as I walked Ellen and Chatterton to the stone pier where the Straker’s Cay passengers waited for the ferry’s arrival. The bay was too shallow to let the big boat come right up to the pier, so all the passengers and freight had to be shuttled out in a red-painted motorboat that was moored at the foot of a precariously narrow iron ladder at the pier’s seaward end. One of the adventures of landing on or leaving from Straker’s Cay was negotiating that rusting and perilous ladder.

We arrived at the pier at dusk. There was no sign of the ferry yet, though that was nothing unusual for the boats were often hours late in edging into the small bay, but for entertainment there was always the islanders’ conversation as well as a small palm-thatched hut where lukewarm Coca-Cola and thin beer could be bought. “Don’t wait,” Ellen said to me, “we’ll be fine.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

“Don’t, please,” she said, and I realised that the prospect of waiting with me, with so much to say and no real privacy in which to say it, was troubling Ellen, and so I said goodbye to Jackson Chatterton, who was going back to his clinic in America, and then I kissed Ellen.

“It seems stupid,” I said, “that it should end like this.”

“Think how much worse it is for Thessy,” she said with an apparent callousness that was designed to keep her from crying, but the design failed, and the tears began to run as she hugged me one last time. “I wish I’d remembered to bring some jeans,” she said suddenly, “because it’s going to be so embarrassing to climb down that ladder wearing a dress.”

“But a thrill for everyone else,” I said, then I hugged her close and advised her not to go to Great Inagua, but to sail Addendum to the Florida Keys instead.

“I probably will,” she sniffed.

I shook Jackson Chatterton’s hand again. “Safe home,” I told the big man. “And take care of Ellen.”

“I will, Nick, I will.”

I walked back to Masquerade alone. The night was noisy with insects and bright with stars. The kerosene lamps at Bonefish’s house were lit and at least a score of mourners still sang under the lemon trees, but I wanted to be alone and so I skirted the house. A noise erupted in the bushes to my right, sounding like a heavy body charging straight at me, and I turned, heart thumping with adrenalin, but it was only one of Bonefish’s pigs that swerved away from me and ran squealing towards the light.

Masquerade was a great shadowed bulk in the darkness. I clumsily climbed the nine-foot wooden ladder and pushed back the tarpaulin which had failed to keep Bonefish’s chickens from roosting in her cockpit. The big timber baulks that cradled my boat creaked as my weight shifted her hull and as I slid back her hatch and dropped down into the cabin.

It was stiflingly hot below decks. I edged into the forecabin, which I had rebuilt as a workshop and store, and pushed open the forehatch. Back in the big main-cabin I took out the companionway’s washboards so that the night’s small wind could blow clean through the two sweltering cabins, then lit a candle that I placed under a lamp’s glass chimney. The small dancing light reflected back from the glossy white paint and deep varnish that preserved Masquerade’s cabin from the ravages of salt and sea. It was strange to be in my boat again. If I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the sound of the hymn singing, concentrating instead on the beat of the surf, it was almost possible to imagine that Masquerade was afloat, and then the wind gusted to make the hull move a creaking millimetre inside its cradling and the illusion was almost perfect.

The booming call of the ferry’s siren announcing the ship’s late arrival in the bay made me open my eyes. Palm fronds clattered above the companionway, belying my dream that I was at sea. I opened the locker above the sink and took out a warm bottle of beer. The beer, with a tin of fruit cake left over from Christmas, would make my supper.

It was still cruelly hot inside the boat. The wind was not finding its way down either hatchway so that the sweat was running in rivulets down my back and belly, and I knew I would have to rig a canvas windscoop before I tried to sleep. Then I forgot the discomfort of the heat for the boat had shifted again, but this new movement was not caused by the wind, but rather because someone or something had stepped on to the ladder. I froze, then there was the unmistakable sound of a shoe scraping on one of the crudely carved rungs. “Who’s there?” I called.

There was no answer, only the creak of the ladder as my visitor climbed towards Masquerade’s cockpit. “Who’s there?” I called, but again no one replied, and I thought of a drug lord’s revenge, so I pulled up the cabin sole and groped deep into the bilge for the big clumsy pistol, yet even if I found the Webley I knew it would be too late, for I had protected the hidden weapon with a thick waterproof wrapping of taped plastic and it would take me precious seconds to disentangle the gun, by which time the intruder would have found me. I felt my blood run cold with the fear of imminent horror, then I wondered whether the bastards had already found Ellen and I cursed myself for abandoning her on the pier.

I found the gun and pulled it towards me, but my intruder was already standing at the top of the companionway ladder, blotting out the stars and staring down to where I sprawled helplessly in the small yellow light of the guttering candle. I let the plastic-wrapped gun drop back into the bilge.

“I didn’t want to go home,” my visitor said, and her wine-dark dress rustled as she climbed down into the cabin. I stood up to meet her and to hold her. Then I kissed her, and my own eyes were closed because I was so very glad that she had come back. “I’m not a cook any more, am I?” Ellen asked, and her voice was little more than a whisper.

“No,” I said, “you’re not.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

Her dress rustled as it dropped to the cabin’s sole. Above Masquerade the stars blazed.

And I blew out the candle.

In the morning I found Ellen sitting by the lagoon, hugging her knees and watching the sea. Her flaming red hair was twisted into a bun. Apart from a book to read on the ferry she had brought no luggage to the island, for she had not expected to stay beyond the one day, so she had nothing to wear except the red dress. In its place she had found a pair of my old shorts and a T-shirt, both of which hung from her like a suit of barge sails draped on a racing dinghy, but even my misshapen clothes could not diminish Ellen’s beauty. I smiled at her with the shyness new lovers have on first waking, and Ellen smiled back, but it was apparent she did not want to talk; instead she just took my hand and gave my knuckles a swift kiss as though to tell me that everything was well.

I made coffee on the spirit stove, and offered her a slice of the tinned fruit cake for breakfast. Startlingly white egrets were flying up from the far mangrove trees. “Are there flamingos here?” Ellen broke the silence.

“I’ve not seen any.”

“What were you thinking”—Ellen turned a very serious face to me—“when you had to kill those men on Wavebreaker?”

I wondered where that question had sprung from. “I was too scared to think.”

“Scared?” She still frowned as though she did not believe me.

“Scared and sick,” I admitted. “As thugs go, you see, I’m remarkably inexperienced.” I spoke lightly, though in truth I still woke sweating in the night as I imagined what would have happened if I had not managed to seize Sweetman’s Uzi and kill the two gunmen before they turned the Kalashnikovs on us. My other nightmare was my firm conviction that if I had only fired at the second gunman first, Thessy would still be alive. “The best quality for a soldier,” I said sadly, “is to have no imagination, none.”

But I had imagination enough to know what would happen if Jesse Sweetman or his friends found us and so, after breakfast, I unwrapped and cleaned the big Webley. Ellen watched me do the chore, but made no comment. When it was cleaned I pushed the gun into a pocket of my shorts, but after an hour my own sense of looking ridiculous made me take the gun off and hide it again in Masquerade.

I spent the rest of that morning with Bonefish, not doing very much and not even speaking about Thessy very much, but just trying to repair the reed-valve on Bonefish’s old outboard motor. I did promise to write to some of our old charter customers to enquire if they had any photographs of Thessy, for the only picture that Bonefish and his wife possessed was one that had been taken when Thessy was about eight years old—though, as Ellen remarked, he hardly looked a day different to when he was seventeen.

It was a sweet weekend, despite the sadness that had brought Ellen and me so close. I did some work on Masquerade, but mostly Ellen and I just walked or swam or talked. The best day we had was the Sunday, Ellen’s last full day on Straker’s Cay, when we sailed Bonefish’s skiff to one of the deserted outer islands where nothing but the sea and the birds and the iguanas and the palms existed. We swam naked in the lagoon and watched a Spotted Eagle Ray’s languid beauty as it rippled above the sandy sea-floor, and I turned my head to watch Ellen swimming and I wondered if ever again I would know such happiness, and then I remembered that once Masquerade was in the Pacific we would spend our lives wandering between palm-fringed beaches and forgotten islands.

We let the sun dry us, and we made the silly talk that lovers do. We astonished ourselves at our own joy, and believed that no one else had ever known such bliss. I thought of Robin-Anne’s dismissal of all pleasure as nothing but the brain’s unromantic secretion of chemical traces, and I supposed that love could be similarly dismissed as a cocktail of genetic impulses and seething testosterone, but I did not believe it. This was happiness, a glorious happiness, a taste of heaven. I did not know why I loved Ellen; I thought half her opinions were mad, and she probably thought all mine were, yet we laughed together and we had found a care for each other and for each other’s dreams and lives and hopes.

Ellen had brought her book to the deserted island, but was too hot or too happy or too lazy to read it. “A Feminist Symbolist’s Perception of Goethe,” I read the title aloud. “Bloody hell, woman.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Ellen said lazily, “on account of its utter lack of pictures.”

“You can buy me the comic-strip version.” I flipped through the book, seeing where Ellen had made notes in her tiny precise handwriting. The author was described as being ‘chair-person’ of a Women’s Studies Department of a Californian university. “Why is there no such thing as a Department of Men’s Studies?” I asked.

“We leave the study of mindless brutes to the animal behaviourists,” she pounced with undisguised glee, then laughed at her small victory. “Would you like to be studied?” she asked me.

“No.”

“But I study you.” She turned over on to her front. We were both still naked and our warm skin was flecked with sand.

“What have you learned about me?” I asked.

“How very desperate the big tough Nick is for approval and love.” She pronounced the verdict very seriously, then lightly touched my face with a finger. “What happened to all the other girls?”

“What other girls?”

She sighed and rolled on to her back. “He was a marine, and he’s a virgin?”

I laughed. “Some were good, some were bad. Some just wanted to use me as a means to meet my father.”

“So you learned to distrust them?”

“Maybe.” I thought about it. “Some just wanted me to be more ambitious. One girl said she wouldn’t marry me unless I became an officer.”

“And why didn’t you become an officer?”

“Because that would have been expected of Tom Breakspear’s son.”

“Ah!” Ellen said triumphantly. “So you joined the Marines solely to annoy your father! You wanted his attention. He ignored you as a child, didn’t he?”

“No more than he ignored anything or anyone else,” I said. “In my father’s heaven there is only one star.”

“Poor Nick.”

“No.” I did not need pity. I had, after all, grown up in the most lavish wealth. I had lived in a succession of beautiful houses, from English manors to exquisite French châteaux to a vast Beverly Hills mansion. I remembered the hours of loneliness in Beverly Hills, the echo of the marble hallways, the splash of the fountain in the swimming pool and the subdued laughter of the servants in their rooms over the big garage. Once, when I was eight, my father had bought everything in a toyshop and had it all shipped to the mansion. I had rewarded him by putting every single toy into the swimming pool until the blue water was heaped with tin trains and teddy bears, awash with building blocks and cowboy outfits, littered with bicycles and dolls’ houses. “My father,” I said slowly, “should have beaten the living daylights out of me.”

“Silly Nick.” She cut open a mango and pushed a slice towards me. “I suspect I would like your father.”

“You would like him if he wanted you to like him. He has the ability to be whatever anyone wants him to be, and if you wanted him to be modest and kind and erudite and learned, then that’s what he’d be for you, and you’d never believe it if I told you that he screws anything that moves, regardless of gender, and has a mind like a cesspit.”

“But you love him.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re his favourite child?” The guess was a little more tentative than her previous assertion, but it was no less true.

“Probably,” I conceded, then watched as Ellen, satisfied with her cross-examination, lay back and closed her eyes. “So what about you?” I asked.

“What about me?”

“Who were your lovers?”

It was an awkward question, born of a lover’s clumsy jealousy, but Ellen did not seem to mind it being asked. “Academics and activists.” She shrugged, as though none of them had left a mark on her soul. “They told me they were above lust, that their interest in me was purely to share the cause and explore the cosmos, but all they ever really wanted was a fuck.”

“You can’t blame them,” I said, maybe a shade too warmly.

Ellen turned her head and looked very gravely at me. I thought I was about to be reprimanded for levity, but instead she smiled. “Poor Sir Tom,” she said gently.

“To have me as a son, you mean?”

“To be denied you as a son,” she corrected me, then drew my face down to hers.

The waves rippled the sand. The wind was a warm sigh. The world was at peace. I was in love.

We went back to Masquerade and I built a fire and cooked freshly caught mullet for our supper. I had not taken the Webley revolver to the deserted beach, but I kept it beside me as we ate. Ellen hated the sight of the weapon, and claimed we did not need it. “That man Smedley didn’t say that Sweetman’s friends would take revenge,” she told me that evening in her most no-nonsense tone, “only that there was a possibility that they might. I reckon they won’t, because if they really wanted to kill us, then they would surely have tried already. I think Smedley is just trying to earn his salary by being pompous.”

I was more concerned than Ellen. I was far less sanguine than I had been when the DEA agent had first uttered his lackadaisical warning. I felt fairly safe on Straker’s Cay; the island was so small, the islanders were watching out for us, and no stranger could have landed without our knowing of their arrival within minutes, but it was that snug safety of the place which was undoubtedly contributing to Ellen’s growing sense of security, and that worried me. It especially worried me that she was insisting on returning to Freeport the next day, and so, after we had eaten, I again tried to persuade her not to leave Straker’s Cay at all.

She shook her head. “I can’t do a proper job here, Nick. I’d want to feel useful.”

“I can teach you some carpentry.”

“Thank you, but no,” she said very deliberately, then laughed at the very thought of handling a saw or a chisel. “It’ll be OK,” she reassured me. “I’ll sail Addendum to the Keys and hide there like a little bunny in its hole.”

“Then at least let me escort you as far as Addendum,” I urged her.

She turned her head to look at me. The fire was burning low and its dark light shadowed her face wondrously. “I am not in need of a nursemaid, Nicholas Breakspear.” She always used my full name whenever she wished to chide me, which was usually at those moments when she thought I was exhibiting the cardinal male sin of being over-protective.

“I just want you to be safe,” I explained.

“I want myself to be safe, astonishingly enough,” she said tartly, “so I shall sail away from here on a safely crowded ferry, safely collect some clothes from my apartment, say a safe goodbye to the Literacy Project, then safely disappear on Addendum. Does that safe agenda meet with your approval?”

“I’d still rather come with you to make sure that you’ll be all right,” I said stubbornly.

“You’ve no reason to travel to Freeport.” She leaned forward and tried to stir some life into the fire. “I’m a grown woman, not some shivering female in need of protection.”

She was adamant, so late that night I walked to the village and, without Ellen knowing, tried to telephone the Maggot. In truth I had little hope of reaching him, for using the Bahamian inter-island telephone system is akin to bouncing messages through far galaxies towards an alien starship that might or might not exist. The system was a mixture of bakelite telephones, fibre-optics, old-fashioned operators, microwave links, and VHF radios, and it was a rare day that any two components meshed smoothly. However, fate was being kind to me that Sunday night and the whole system worked beautifully and, even more miraculously, the Maggot was actually at home. I asked him a favour, and the Maggot, being a kind man, gave it to me. “But don’t tell Ellen!” I warned him.

“Not a word,” he promised, “not a word.”

Which meant, whether Ellen liked it or not, that I had done the male chauvinist thing, and she was protected.

I slept badly, dreaming of Thessy’s body bumping across the locker’s drowned sill, then of the dying man’s shoes beating the deck like a drummer’s tattoo.

I woke Ellen with my restlessness. For a time we lay silent, listening to the night waves breaking on the reefs beyond the lagoon, and to the clatter of the palm fronds above our grounded boat. The windscoop drifted a fitful breeze through Masquerade that stirred the black mesh of the insect screen that Ellen had rigged across the hatchway. “I don’t want Thessy to have died for nothing,” I said at last, explaining my unrest.

“Are you dreaming of revenge, my noble and silly Nick?”

“Yes.”

She traced her fingers across my chest. “Leave it to the law.”

“The law won’t do anything. It’s been corrupted by money.”

“So what will you do?” Ellen challenged me. “Go in shooting? Nick at high noon? Gunfight at the Sea Rat Corral? And you’ll end up just like Thessy, nothing but a mound of dirt in a cemetery.”

“Thessy’s not a mound of dirt,” I protested, “he’s in heaven, where he doesn’t have to read gloomy minor prophets any longer and he gets fried bread and bananas every morning, and God has given him a lovely boat to sail in a challenging wind all day and every day, and he’s got lots of friends and he keeps telling them about this wonderful couple called Nick and Ellen who’ll one day be joining him.”

Ellen laughed, then kissed me, and a tear fell from her cheek on to mine. “So what are you going to do?” she asked softly.

“Nothing.” That sad truth was forced on me by reality, not by inclination. “I don’t even know where to find Sweetman, so I can’t do anything.”

“Good,” she said, then rested her head beside mine. “Sleep now.”

I woke tired, and after breakfast I worked on Masquerade while Ellen read her book in the shade of the cradled hull. Her ferry was not due till the evening, but at midday, just as he had promised, the Maggot’s aircraft swept low overhead. Ellen frowned as the dirty plane sank beyond the palm trees. “I hope that’s not who I think it is.”

“The Maggot?” I managed to sound very innocent. “He’s not such a bad fellow.”

“For a maggot,” Ellen said, “he’s a louse.”

Twenty minutes later the Maggot walked up to Bonefish’s yard, looking as innocent as any man wearing an appallingly garish Hawaiian shirt could look. He pretended that he had simply dropped by the island to see me, and feigned surprise on discovering Ellen was with me, though he could not resist imbuing that surprise with a foully suggestive leer. “Having a good time?” he asked Ellen.

She smiled glacially. “Why don’t I leave you two good old boys to grunt at each other in peace. Maybe you could indulge in a mutual grooming session?” She snapped the book shut, and stood ready to leave, but I managed to stop her by feigning a sudden and brilliant idea.

“Are you flying back to Freeport?” I asked the Maggot, knowing full well that he was.

“I sure am, Nick.” It seemed to me that he was over-acting, but Ellen did not notice.

“It’s crazy for you to take the ferry,” I said to Ellen. “You’ll get home much quicker if you fly! And you’ll save money. You won’t charge her, will you, John?”

“Not a red cent,” he said, like the good trooper he had agreed to be, for on the phone he had nobly undertaken not only to fly Ellen to Freeport, but then to drive her from the airport to her apartment, and from her apartment to the marina where Addendum was moored. Ellen, whether she wished it or not, was going to be guarded, though whether she would permit the Maggot to drive her round the island once she reached Freeport was debatable. Still, by making the phone call to the Maggot I had done what I could to look after her.

She still hesitated before accepting the Maggot’s offer—though I was certain she would accept—for Ellen disliked the ferries, and flying was a far more convenient method of moving around the islands, but the long duration of her hesitation was an eloquent measure of her dislike for the Maggot. However, she finally nodded and even found it possible to thank him politely. “It’s really very kind of you, Mr Maggovertski.”

“It’s all my pleasure, honey. You’ll be ready in an hour?”

The ‘honey’ put a skim of ice on to Ellen’s voice. “I shall indeed be ready, Mr Maggovertski.”

The Maggot scratched deep in his beard. “Call me Maggot, honey, everyone does.”

“Not me, Mr Maggovertski, not me.” She stalked away.

The Maggot watched her until she was out of earshot then shook his head wistfully. “You lucky bastard, Nick.” He took a half-cigarette from behind his ear and relit it. “I’ve never seen her looking so well! You can just see that she was shrivelling away for lack of a bedding, can’t you now? I know she might be a professor, but under the skin she’s just another bimbo.”

There were times, I thought, when Ellen was entirely accurate in her judgement of the Maggot, but I was still grateful to the huge man, so I ignored his crudities and instead thanked him for donating his time, fuel and aeroplane.

“Hell, Nick, it’s a pleasure. But do you really think you’re in danger?” He sounded very sceptical. When I had telephoned the Maggot I had described my fears of Sweetman’s reprisals, and now I forcefully reiterated my conviction that Ellen was in danger. The Maggot, though plainly reluctant to believe me, was polite enough not to scoff at my tale of possible revenge. He was also curious about the events at Sea Rat Cay, and made me tell him the whole story.

“Have you ever seen Dream Baby?” I asked him when I had finished describing the fight on board Wavebreaker. I thought it entirely possible that the Maggot might have seen the oddly painted powerboat during one of his flights about the islands.

He shook his head. “I’d remember a boat like that, Nick.”

“You’re sure?”

“You think I could forget a boat called Dream Baby? With a camouflage paint job?” He shook his head, then frowned. “Does it matter very much?”

“I’d just like to know where they are, that’s all.”

The Maggot gave my shoulder what he thought was a light punch, but which was more like being whacked by a piledriver. “Don’t worry about where they are, but just make sure they don’t know where you are.”

An hour later the three of us walked to the Maggot’s plane that stood baking in the shimmering heat. The plane looked horrible, oil-streaked and filthy, and Ellen shuddered at the sight of it. “Is it safe?” she asked.

“Hell, yes,” the Maggot said. “Mind you, you can never tell what’s safe, can you? I remember when the New Orleans Fruits, that’s the Saints to you, honey, had a fourth and one against us, and they decided to run it, and we reckoned it had to be safe because those toads couldn’t float a fairy fart down a sewer, but—”

“Maggot,” I said, “shut up.”

“I think it’s time we went.” He climbed on to the wing and opened the plane’s door. I helped Ellen up. She was not going to kiss me in front of the Maggot, but she gave me a smile he could not see and, once she was inside the plane, she secretly blew me a kiss.

“I’ll write to you from Florida!” she called.

“Soon! Please!” I called back.

The engines hammered into life, driving scraps of grass and chips of coral back from the propeller’s wash. I stepped back as the plane lurched forward, then watched as it hurtled down the runway and lifted smoothly and safely into the air. The Beechcraft climbed up over Thessy’s grave and I watched my love go, watched till the plane was just a scrap of light in the northern sky, and I went on watching till the faraway plane winked out into distant invisibility. I turned away and felt very much alone, and very much in love.

As it turned out I did have reason to go to Freeport after all, and had I known that good reason I would have had no problem in persuading Ellen to let me accompany her.

Because, once I had watched her fly away, I went to the village post office, which operated in what had once been a chicken shed, to discover that a letter had come to me from McIllvanney’s boatyard. McIllvanney’s secretary, Stella, apologised that she had not sent the money Cutwater Charters owed me for the proctologist’s cruise, but sadly Mr McIllvanney would not authorise the release of any funds until I turned up at the yard to sign the necessary insurance and salvage forms for Wavebreaker.

I swore in frustration. I should have known that McIllvanney would muck around with the money he owed me! And if I had just visited the post office before taking Ellen to the plane I could have flown with her to Freeport. Now I would have to waste a day and two nights making the journey by ferry.

Poverty dictated that I make the journey so, two days later, I clambered down the pier’s dangerous iron ladder and was carried out to the waiting ferry. I changed boats in Nassau, reaching Freeport early on the Thursday morning. I caught a bus to McIllvanney’s boatyard and found the man himself standing on a floating pontoon next to his sleek forty-two-foot motor yacht called Junkanoo. Junkanoo was one of McIllvanney’s own charter boats, but he was plainly about to use her himself for her motor was burbling away and he had been busy untying her stern warp as I arrived. It was also plain that he had company aboard for there was a pile of luggage on Junkanoo’s stern deck and I suspected that the pink garment bag and lavender suitcase were not McIllvanney’s choice of travel gear. Leaning on the suitcase was a tennis racket in a lavender slip case that was embroidered with a big initial ‘D’. McIllvanney, it was apparent, had a girl aboard his boat, which perhaps explained the lack of warmth in his welcome. “So what the fock do you want, Breakspear?”

“You wanted me to sign some papers,” I courteously explained my presence. “So here I am.”

“So come back next week, your Holiness.”

“Just forget it,” I walked away from him. “I’m only in town today, and that’s it. So please yourself. I’ll send you a writ for the money you owe me.”

“Wait, you bastard!”

I waited. He made fast Junkanoo’s stern warp, then jumped aboard to kill her engine. Almost immediately the door from the main-cabin opened and the tall, fair-haired girl I had met in McIllvanney’s Lucaya apartment walked on to the stern deck. She was still wearing high heels and very little else. She recognised me and gave me a wholesome and welcoming smile. “Nick! It’s just so very good to see you again. How are you doing?” She asked the question with that earnest rising inflection by which Americans seem to imply a genuine curiosity for what is otherwise an entirely formal greeting.

“Very well, thank you, and yourself?” I matched her politeness, but I was also trying to remember the girl’s name. Her body, clad in its barely existent bikini, was entirely unforgettable, but her name had disappeared into the space between the stars.

“I’m doing good, thank you,” the girl said with heartfelt enthusiasm, “real good!”

I still could not place her name, and my only clue was the big ‘D’ embroidered in shiny pink thread on the tennis racket’s lavender case. Debbie? Dolly? Denise? Donna, of course! “It’s very nice to meet you again, Donna,” I said.

“You’re just going to have to forgive me for one little moment, Nick,” she said as though our meeting was the most important thing in her world, then she turned a worried face on McIllvanney. “I just thought you ought to know, Matt, that the air conditioning went off.”

“Of course it went off, you silly cow, because I turned the focking engine off, and you can’t have the air conditioner on unless you’re generating some focking electricity because it drains too much current from the focking battery.”

“Oh! How silly of me! I should have known!” She gave me another gladsome smile, all teeth and sparkle. “Are you coming aboard, Nick? We’ve got some champagne in the cooler.”

“No, he’s focking well not coming on board, he’s coming with me.” McIllvanney jumped on to the pontoon. “Just wait for me, woman.”

“It’s been so good talking with you again, Nick,” Donna called as we walked away.

“Are you poaching the firm’s inventory?” I asked McIllvanney when we were safely out of Donna’s earshot.

“I’m just doing a delivery job, all right!” He turned, clearly upset by my jocular accusation. He rammed his fingers towards my eyes as though trying to blind me, but instead forcing me to take a backwards step along the pontoon. “I’m just delivering the bint to a client!”

“OK! Forget I spoke!” I said placatingly.

“I’m just delivering her to a client, and when he’s used the stupid cow, I fetch her back. Either me or Bellybutton fetches her back, but there’s no funny business, you understand?” He walked on, simmering with fury. Starkisser rocked gently beside the pontoon and I noted how skilfully Bellybutton had painted the silver star on her long glittering bow. He had added a lipstick-red cupid’s mouth at the very centre of the shooting star. Bellybutton himself had sidled away from my unexpected arrival, scuttling away up the office stairs as though he was desperate to avoid me.

McIllvanney took the same stairs two at a time, while I hobbled behind him. Bellybutton, as I entered the office, was finishing a telephone call. He gave me his usual sly and maniacal grin, then edged about the room towards the door. Stella had already found the necessary papers in the filing cabinet and now spread them on McIllvanney’s desk. “Sign wherever there’s a pencil cross,” McIllvanney curtly ordered me. Bellybutton, the door safely reached, gave one last mocking smile and was gone.

I began reading the top form.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” McIllvanney complained, “but are you going to read every word before you sign them?”

“Yes.”

He growled, but there was nothing he could do. Stella, with a friendly but nervous smile to me, had slipped out of the office to buy some milk, leaving me alone with McIllvanney who stared angrily out of the window while I methodically read through the small print and sub-clauses and obfuscations of the various forms. Yet, despite having been written by language-murdering lawyers, the forms were straightforward enough; mere formalities to do with insurance and with Wavebreaker’s condition on the morning she sank. I began signing the forms, first authenticating my own qualifications to prove that the boat had been under competent command, though that, I thought, was a dubious assertion, for in fact Wavebreaker had been pirated before she sank. “I hear you’re salvaging her?” I said to McIllvanney.

“Aye.” He was adding his own signature to some of the forms and, for a moment, he seemed reluctant to say any more, then he decided that a modicum of politeness might hasten the scribbling of my signatures, and so he grudgingly elaborated. “They say they’ll have her up by tomorrow night.”

“I’d be grateful if you could find Thessy’s Bible for me, and ask Stella to send it on to his father?”

I thought he would refuse the favour, but then he nodded curtly before sweeping the signed papers into an envelope. Donna was doing aerobic exercises on Junkanoo’s rear deck, a sight to provoke cardiac arrest. “Do you know what the hell has happened to Ellen?” McIllvanney asked me. He had his back to the window as he wrote an address on the envelope.

So far as I knew Ellen was on board Addendum, and hopefully in the Florida Keys by now, but I had no intention of letting McIllvanney know anything about her travels. “Has Ellen been away?” I asked ingenuously instead.

McIllvanney responded to my mock-innocent question with a filthy look. “Of course she’s been away. She went to the funeral, and she hasn’t been seen since. I know that, because I went to her flat on Sunday, but she wasn’t there.”

“Why don’t you just leave her alone?” I asked with rising anger. “She’s not for hire. She’s not going to become one of your whores, so just forget her!”

“It’s none of your focking business why I want to talk to the bint, and—”

The clashing noise of the pistol’s cocking action stopped his voice cold. He looked up, and for once I actually saw McIllvanney go pale. He was staring into the cavernous black muzzle of my .455 Webley pistol. It is a very frightening pistol. For a start it fires an enormous bullet, so the barrel gapes alarmingly, and the gun is built on a gigantic scale. The weapon is almost a foot long. As it happened the gun which was threatening McIllvanney was not loaded, but he did not know that, and the sweat was prickling at his forehead. “Ellen is not for hire,” I said again, but this time very slowly and very distinctly.

“Jesus goddamn wept.” McIllvanney, still pale, stared in horror at the gun’s gaping muzzle. “Christ in his heaven, but why the hell are you carrying that, you fool?”

“Because there are men out there who might want to take revenge for the deaths of the guys I killed. It’s like a family feud, but I’ll be damned before I make it easy for them to finish me off.” The gun had made a hard uncomfortable lump at the small of my back, and I had been glad of the chance to take it out and thus remove the pressure from my spine.

Now the unloaded gun was pointing directly at the bridge of McIllvanney’s nose. He was shaking, and I was using both hands to train the gun, just as if it really was primed to go pop and I was preparing for the mule-like kick of the recoil. “Ellen is not for hire,” I said a third time. “Do you understand me?”

“Bloody hell fire!” McIllvanney stared wide-eyed at me, and his voice took on the aggrieved tone of wounded innocence. “I only wanted to do the girl a favour! Ned Carraway needs a cook on board Hobgoblin because his girl has caught the pox or something, and Ned phoned me to ask if Ellen could step in for a few days!” Ned Carraway was the owner and skipper of a beautiful locally built schooner, Hobgoblin, which was a few feet shorter than Wavebreaker and several light years prettier. Hobgoblin was built of wood and was bereft of almost every modern comfort except the sheer loveliness of sailing blue seas in a proper wooden boat, though the price that Ned and his American wife paid was to spend most of their spare time painting the beast or coaxing its ill-tempered and dangerous petrol engine into brief and reluctant life.

So Ned had needed a replacement cook? I stared at McIllvanney who, sensing my discomfort, pushed the telephone towards me. “If you don’t believe me, phone him!”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid and lowering the gun.

“You’re focking mad!” McIllvanney said fervently. I had scared the daylights out of him, which was something of an achievement, even though I now felt like an idiot.

“Ellen’s got a job looking after a friend’s boat,” I said helpfully, “so I don’t know if she can work for Ned, but if she’s in touch I’ll pass on the message.”

“Ned’s probably found someone else by now. He was pretty desperate, so he was.” McIllvanney was still shaking with the fear that had made him loquacious. It really is very unpleasant indeed to stare into a gun’s muzzle.

I held the gun loosely in my left hand. “It wasn’t loaded,” I told McIllvanney, as though that might make him feel better.

“I don’t give a toss! You should be locked up! Who the hell do you think is coming after you?”

“Sweetman. And the other fellow, Miguel. The guys who were on Dream Baby. Which reminds me. Can you remember where you saw Dream Baby? Because if I can find her, then I’ll find the guys who were responsible for Thessy’s death.”

“You’re mad! You think that boat is still around? They’ll have got rid of Dream-focking-Baby long ago. They’ll have sunk her, so they will. They don’t want trouble, you fool, any more than the rest of us want trouble.”

I pushed the gun into the sweaty space at the small of my back, then let my shirt fall like a curtain over it. “You want me to post your letter?” I offered.

“You’re a lunatic.” McIllvanney was beginning to recover his equilibrium. He opened his window and shouted down at Bellybutton who was pretending to do some work on the pontoons, but in reality was ogling the lubricious Donna. “Hey, Bellybutton! If you ever see Nick Breakspear in this yard again, you run him off, you hear me? Run him off!”

Bellybutton and Donna both stared in surprise at the office window. McIllvanney, pleased with himself, slammed it shut, then glared at Stella, his secretary, who was standing in the doorway with a carton of milk. “And that goes for you, too,” he told her, “if you see this bastard in my yard again, call the police.”

“Yes, Mr McIllvanney.” Stella said nervously.

“Now you,” he pointed at me, “fock away off.”

“Give me my money first.” I did not dare ask him for the money I had earned on the Crowninshield charter, guessing that a sunken schooner had probably voided that contract, but I still wanted my slice from the proctologist and the lawyers.

McIllvanney scribbled me a cheque that he bad-temperedly threw across the desk. I smiled my thanks, then, obedient to his wishes, focked away off.

I went directly from McIllvanney’s office to the bank, determined to cash his cheque before perversity decided him to stop payment. With that precaution successfully accomplished I was left with the best part of a day to kill before I could catch a return ferry, so I found a public telephone that worked and dialled the Maggot’s number. I was half hoping that the big man would offer to fly me home to Straker’s Cay, but I also wanted reassurance that he had delivered Ellen safely to Addendum’s marina. Or perhaps I just wanted to talk to someone about Ellen; I had the disease of all lovers, the need to spread my happiness to whoever could be persuaded to listen.

But that was not to be the Maggot, for all I reached was his answering machine that first belched at me, then chuckled, then instructed me to lay the word down on him. I complied, saying that I would try to reach him later and would buy him a beer if he was free at lunchtime.

I then bought a copy of the Nassau Guardian and took it to a bar where, under the soft thump of a revolving ceiling fan, I sipped a pale beer and read about the new Health Clinic on Great Exuma, and about how the Combined Baptist Choirs of Great Abaco would be raising their voices to the Lord in a Concert of Praise on Sunday next, and how the dead body that had been discovered on the east coast of Andros had now been identified as that of an American tourist, Jackson Chatterton.

I stared at the newspaper. It was shaking, but whether it was my hand or the draught from the fan I could not tell.

The newspaper reported that Jackson Chatterton had drowned, and that his body had been in the water for some time before it was discovered. His remains had now been delivered into the care of the American authorities. It was a little filler of a story, a squib to take up space, but it left me quaking with horror.

Oh God, no, I prayed. No, please God. I closed my eyes very tight, but that did not help, so I opened them again and stared at the small story that was so very bland, and I supposed that Chatterton’s killers must have been waiting on the ferry, because they had surely assumed that all of us would be leaving Straker’s Cay on the next sailing after Thessy’s funeral. But instead they had only found Jackson, which meant they must still be looking for Ellen and me, and I remembered Warren Smedley’s warning, that I had treated so lightly, and I felt stark naked and very vulnerable in that hot, brightly painted bar; I looked frenetically around me, but there were only two men playing dominoes, a dog that was twitching in its flea-ridden sleep, and a barman who gave me a very odd look as though he suspected I was already drunk.

I tore the story from the newspaper and shoved it into my pocket. The gun was a cold hard lump in my back. I felt certain that everyone could see its obvious shape beneath my shirt. My heart was thumping. I was frightened. I was still having difficulty in coming to terms with the news.

Jackson Chatterton was dead. The big, stolid, angry, gentle man was dead. I remembered his childish delight in being photographed in front of the great seas that had been running before the storm, and I felt a surge of impotent anger at the men who had killed him, and doubtless they were the same men who would be trying to murder Ellen and me. They were not just taking revenge for the deaths of the two gunmen, but destroying all the witnesses to Thessy’s murder.

And suppose I was the only witness left alive? Suppose that Ellen had not sailed away? My blood was running cold with terror as I abandoned what was left of my beer and went into the sweltering street. There were no taxis. God damn it, there were no taxis! The street was crowded with cheerful American sailors, come ashore from one of the naval ships engaged in Exercise Stingray, and the sailors seemed to have taken all the cabs. I pushed through the crowds on the pavement, balefully watching for any face that watched me. I saw no one suspicious, but I did see a taxi suddenly swerve to drop three sailors outside a massage parlour, and I shouted at it, waved, then commandeered it by climbing inside.

I paid off the cab at the marina where Addendum had been moored, and from where Ellen should have sailed two days before. The marina’s gate was open and unguarded. Next to the gate was a small office, but, though its door was open and a small battered radio was playing rock music, the office was empty.

I ran down to the pontoons. I could see a score of monohulls, and the usual cluster of gleaming motor yachts, but there were no catamarans moored in the marina. I felt a surge of relief that Ellen was safe, for I knew our enemies would never find her if she was at sea, lost in or beyond the Gulf Stream and among the swarms of other pleasure craft; but then, just as I felt myself relaxing from the panic that had besieged me, I saw her.

I saw Addendum. The big white catamaran lay alongside the very last pontoon. Her name was painted in fake black oversize typescript across the transom of her starboard hull, and she had the forlorn air of abandonment.

The panic returned then, but I told myself there was still hope. There had to be hope, for I could not bear the thought of what I most feared. Perhaps Ellen was still provisioning the boat? I went to the end pontoon, then climbed aboard Addendum to discover that no one else had been aboard the big catamaran in days. Litter had blown from the marina’s yard to collect in a leeward corner of her capacious cockpit, while a spider had made a thick white web across the louvres of the padlocked cabin door. A dishrag had been hung to dry from the ensign-hooks on the signal halliard and the dishrag’s folds had stiffened to the consistency of dry chamois leather.

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 companionway. 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 depressingly 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?”

“Thanks.” I went to the window and stared down into the yard. Junkanoo’s pontoon was empty, evidence that McIllvanney had taken Donna to her client. There was no sign of Bellybutton. Starkisser rocked gently at her berth. The marina looked strangely empty without Wavebreaker’s towering presence. “Can I use the phone?” I asked Stella. “It’s long distance.”

“Call the moon for all I care, Nick. I don’t pay the bills.” I called Ellen’s mother in Providence, Rhode Island. I did not want to alarm her so I merely described myself as an old colleague who happened to be in America and wanted to speak with Ellen. Her mother told me that Ellen was in the Bahamas. I thanked her. Another escape route of hope was thus blocked.

I dialled the Maggot, but again I only reached his irritating message. “John?” I said to the damned machine, “this is Nick, and I’ve lost Ellen, and I need to talk to you. If you come home, then for God’s sake don’t leave till we’ve spoken. I’ll keep trying to reach you.” I put the telephone down. “Shit.”

Stella had heard the message I had dictated to the Maggot’s machine. “You lost Ellen?”

I nodded. “She’s not at her apartment, she hasn’t gone back to her mother, she’s not on her friends’ boat, and she’s not working for the Literacy Project.” I shrugged. “So I don’t know where she is.”

Stella heard the despair in my voice and tried to cheer me up by saying that Ellen was a survivor and a tough girl. I smiled my thanks for her efforts, and tried to believe her. Then I sat in McIllvanney’s chair to read my small pile of mail. Most of it had been forwarded from England. A journalist from London had written to say he was writing my father’s biography and he would be most grateful if I could spare him some time to share my memories. One of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Taxes wrote to remind me that I had not filed an Income Tax return in three years, and that consequently Her Majesty would appreciate hearing from me pronto. A bank wanted to send me a credit card. “Stuff ’em.” I screwed the mail into a ball and tossed it at the garbage can.

Stella gave me a mug of coffee. “I know the man tried to see Ellen on Sunday.” ‘The man’ was McIllvanney.

“He told me,” I said, then, thinking of the cashier’s assertion that there had been more than one man trying to see Ellen, I asked whether Bellybutton had accompanied McIllvanney. If McIllvanney had gone to Ellen’s apartment alone, then the men the cashier had seen must have been Sweetman’s friends.

Stella, who did not like Bellybutton, shrugged. “I don’t know.” She frowned suddenly, then pointed at me with a teaspoon. “But when you came to the yard to sign those papers this morning, Bellybutton made a phone call. It was about you. I heard him say your name.”

“What else did he say?”

“I couldn’t hear.” She suddenly gave me a guileless smile. “But you can always ask him.”

“Bellybutton’s still here?”

“He’s playing poker in the sail loft.” Before I could stop her Stella had opened the office door and was shouting down into the yard. “Hey, Bellybutton! I want you! Get your lazy bones up here!”

I would have preferred to approach Bellybutton in my own way, but Stella had precipitated the moment, so I went past her on to the outside staircase just as Bellybutton emerged scowling from the sail loft. “What is it, woman?” he was shouting, then he saw me. “You!” He pointed a threatening finger at me. “You’re not supposed to be here! You get the hell out of here!”

“You answer Nick’s questions, Bellybutton, you hear me?” Stella demanded stridently.

“You shut your black mouth, woman!”

“Listen—” I tried to intervene.

“You get your white ass out of here!” Bellybutton screamed at me. “You got ten seconds! And I’m counting!”

“I only wanted to ask you…”

“Bellybutton!” Stella screeched at him. “You remember your good manners!”

“Fuck my good manners.” He looked back to me. “Five seconds! You’re not asking me nothing! You’re getting out of here! That’s what Mr Mac says you’re to do, and that’s what you’re going to do! Three seconds, two, one!” Suddenly, and with alarming speed, he drew a knife from his belt. It was a heavy-bladed filleting knife that he pointed towards me as he advanced to the bottom of the stairs. “You want to give me aggravation? OK, I don’t mind aggravation. My Mama weaned me on to aggravation!” His three poker-playing friends, two of them still holding their playing cards, had come to the sail loft’s door. Bellybutton, evidently needing to show off in front of this small audience, began climbing the stairs towards me.

“You go back!” Stella ordered him. “And you put that cutter away!”

“Shut your filthy black mouth, woman!”

“I only want to ask you some questions…” I began, trying to introduce a little civility into the yard, but I could have saved my breath.

“OK, man! You’re in real trouble!” Bellybutton began taking the stairs two at a time.

So I drew the gun.

Stella screamed and fled into the office. She slammed the door.

One of the poker players shouted a warning at Bellybutton, but the warning was hardly needed for he had already seen the gun and his eyes had widened to the size of eggs. He had also stopped cold. “No!” he said.

“I just want to ask you…” I began again and in the same civil, unfrightening tone.

“No! No!” Bellybutton backed away, stumbled on a step, then took a flying leap from the staircase to land in an ungainly sprawl on the yard. A stray cat fled in terror.

“Listen!” I shouted.

“You’re mad! Mad!” Bellybutton picked himself up and ran towards the pontoons. His friends were making themselves scarce, fleeing towards the gate and scattering their cards to the warm wind.

“Stop!” I shouted at Bellybutton. I was running after him, but he was much faster and was already unclipping Starkisser’s cockpit cover. He had the boat’s keys on a chain hanging from his belt.

I took a couple of the big cartridges from my trousers’ pocket and shoved them into the Webley’s cylinder. I closed the gun, then cocked it. “Stop!” I shouted again.

Bellybutton used his knife to slash Starkisser’s warps. He thrust the boat away from the pontoon. I was running closer, but stopping to load the heavy gun had cost me time. “I only want to ask you a question.” I was pleading with him.

Bellybutton fumbled the key into the ignition, turned it, and Starkisser’s twin drives crackled into deafening life. A startled pelican flopped off a pontoon stake, and pigeons clattered up from the yard’s roofs. Bellybutton twisted his panicked face towards me, then rammed the twin throttles hard forward so that Starkisser skidded away from the dock like a terrified horse.

“Damn you! Stop!” I fired, not at the boat, nor at Bellybutton, but into the water ahead of Starkisser. I could hardly hear the gun’s report over the snarl of the engines, but I saw the bullet spurt up a white fountain, then Bellybutton was snatching at the wheel to stop the sleek blue craft from slip-sliding into the rock wall that was Wavebreaker’s empty wharf. I fired again, this time blasting a small puff of rock dust from the dock above Bellybutton’s head, and at the very same moment Starkisser’s polished stern struck the wharf with a crack that must have been heard halfway to Florida, but the boat did not falter. Instead she just dug her rear end into the water and took off like a jet-fighter overdosing on after-burners.

“Shit.” Bellybutton had known something, I was sure of it, but I had lost him. Or perhaps he was just plain terrified of guns. Whatever, he was gone, and I pushed the gun back into my waistband. The water in the dock was slopping and churning from the turmoil of Starkisser’s stern drives.

Stella, reappearing at the top of the office stairs, had a hand over her mouth as she tried to stifle a scream. “I’m sorry, Stella.” I went to the bottom of the office steps. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK, Nick.”

I told her that if Ellen telephoned then would she please ask her to get in touch with the Maggot. I gave Stella the Maggot’s address and telephone number, but I could feel hopelessness rising around me like a great cold flood. I gave the Maggot another call, but his answering machine just offered me its flippant, crude message. Stella called me a taxi. I had two places left to search, after which I faced the anhedonia of despair.

McIllvanney’s cheque had given me more than enough money to pay for the long taxi drive to West End. I could have saved myself the cost of the cab by telephoning, but the very act of moving about the island engendered its own hope. Motion. staved off despair.

It was lunchtime when the taxi dropped me off at the Harbour Hotel. I bought a bottle of beer before walking back along the straggling waterfront from where I could see that Hobgoblin’s mooring was empty, or rather that it was occupied only by Ned Carraway’s cream-painted dinghy. Ned Carraway’s cream-painted house was shaded by a huge bougainvillaea. Everything Ned and Julie owned was painted cream; the boat, the house, the furniture, the bicycles, the van, even the children’s home-made building blocks. Hobgoblin was a wooden boat that needed paint to save her from the sun’s destruction, and Ned had bought a job lot of cream paint from a bankrupt building merchant, and he now owned enough cream paint to last a dozen lifetimes. Julie claimed that she dreamed of cream paint. I opened the cream-coloured gate and immediately a tethered piglet tried to charge me and only succeeded in tripping itself up and squealing with sudden fright. A slew of nappies were hanging to dry on a washing line at the side of the house. I banged on the screen door. “Julie!”

“Nick! It’s my dream man!” Julie Carraway came to the door with her latest baby propped on her hip. The baby was the colour of café au lait, while Julie, who was a plump and cheerful girl from Cincinnati, was the colour of melded freckles. “Don’t tell me,” she said, “you’ve come to take me away. You’ve got a Rolls-Royce waiting at the Star Hotel, a private aeroplane on the strip, and a bottle of champagne hidden behind your back?”

I brought out my half empty bottle of beer. “Will that do?”

“Story of my life.” She plopped on to a half-broken chair on the cream-painted verandah and unselfconsciously bared a heavy breast for the baby. “He’s a hungry little devil. Takes after his father.” She grinned from the baby to me. “Sit down, Nick. Don’t mind the madhouse. If you want another beer there’s some in the kitchen, but don’t bother with the fridge because it’s broken. The bottles are in a zinc bucket under the sink.” I could hear those children too small to be at school playing behind the house. Julie had six children; all of whom she happily called her half-and-halves. One of the smaller half-and-halves looked solemnly at me from the edge of the cream-painted screen door, then, with a grin, ran off to join her siblings.

I perched on the verandah’s edge. “I’m looking for Ellen.”

Julie must have heard the despair in my voice for she offered me a sympathetic look, but she could offer me nothing more. “I haven’t seen her in weeks, Nick.” Then her antennae must have detected something else, for she gave me a very shrewd glance. “Are you two suddenly sweet on each other?”

“Yes.”

“That’s great, Nick! I always thought you and Ellen should get together. You’re just like Ned and me, unlikely enough to make it really work!” Julie’s pleasure was genuine and touching.

That pleasure made me smile, but sadly. “She’s disappeared, Julie, and that bastard McIllvanney said that Ned had phoned because he needed a replacement cook on Hobgoblin, and I was wondering if that’s where she’s gone?”

“Ned called Matt McIllvanney?” Julie sounded incredulous, for McIllvanney was not noted for showing any kindness to his rivals, even to rivals as unthreatening as Ned and Julie, which made it somewhat odd that Ned might have asked the Ulsterman for help.

“McIllvanney says Ned called him,” I insisted.

“When?”

“Sometime last week?”

Julie frowned. “Ned was having a problem with Gwen. Do you know Gwen?” Julie had herself been Hobgoblin’s cook till she became the first mate’s mate, after which she and Ned had bought the boat as a home for their marriage, though now, because most charter customers don’t take kindly to being overrun by the skipper and cook’s small children, Julie lived ashore and Gwen, who was one of Ned’s distant cousins from the Family Islands, cooked superb meals on Hobgoblin’s antiquated charcoal stoves. I said I knew Gwen, and Julie shifted the sucking baby to a more comfortable position. “Her mom was ill, if I remember. Ned called me eight days ago, but he didn’t say anything about Ellen. He wasn’t even phoning about Gwen, really, but because he’d had to go ashore to get a new gasket for the air-tank compressor. I remember he said that Gwen was worried, but he didn’t mention replacing her, and they were way away, Nick! All the way down in the Turks, for God’s sake! He called me from Sapodilla Bay!”

Sapodilla Bay was in the Turks and Caicos Islands, five hundred miles away. “Can you talk to Ned?” I asked her.

Julie hooted. “We’re not rigged like Wavebreaker! Ned’s got one antique VHF that only works if you kick it, then sing it the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’! I’ll hear from him when he gets back, and not before, unless he has a problem and has to phone me from one of the islands.”

“When is he back?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

“Ask him to give me a call at the Maggot’s.” I frowned, trying to find a scrap of hope in anything Julie had said. “Are you sure he didn’t mention Ellen at all?”

“Not a word,” Julie said patiently. “He talked about the compressor, he mentioned Gwen’s mom, and he told me that I was the girl of his dreams, but that if a handsome Brit came along it was quite all right for me to run away with him.” She paused to let me laugh, but I was too worried, and so she reached over and patted my arm. “Nick! I wish I could help, but I don’t see how she can be with Ned! He’d have told me! I’ve been away, but he knew where to reach me.”

“You’ve been away?” I was snatching at the frailest straws of hope; dreaming suddenly that Ned might have reached Ellen without Julie’s knowledge.

“I took the kids to Nassau for the weekend.” Julie grimaced. “I went to see the Dreadful Parents who won’t visit us here because they think the toilets are dirty, so they pay me to stay in a nice clean hotel in Nassau. They were trying to persuade me to get a divorce, abandon the half-and-halves, then go home and marry a nice white stockbroker called Elmer who plays golf with Daddy, drives a BMW, and has a mortgage.” She laughed at the very thought. “But Ned knew which hotel we were staying at, and he didn’t call me. Mind you,” she added cheerfully, “Ned wouldn’t talk to the Dreadful Parents if he could possibly help it, and I can’t say I blame him. I’m not really sure why I talk to them myself any longer.”

“Damn,” I said, but speaking of Ellen rather than Julie’s parental woes, and I tilted my head back to stare up into the bougainvillaea. Even the bougainvillaea was cream.

“Is it that bad?” Julie asked.

“It could be,” I said bleakly.

Julie paused. “Is it to do with that trouble on Wavebreaker?” The gossip had clearly run the island’s waterfronts like wildfire, and I could not blame Julie for being curious, so I gave her a brief account of what had happened at Sea Rat Cay, and talking of it made me think of Jesse Sweetman and his peons, and of Thessy shot, and of Jackson Chatterton drowned, and of happiness snatched away. Not three weeks ago I had thought myself so close to paradise; with nothing but a boat to mend and a girl to take to the farthest corner of the world, but then the senator had persuaded me to help his kids and now I was bereft and close to utter despair. I took a pull at my beer that had at last warmed to a drinkable temperature. “If Ned had wanted a cook”—I was worrying at this one like a bad tooth—“would he have called for Ellen?”

“Of course he would! Ned’s always had an eagle eye for a pretty girl.” Julie laughed with pleasure at the thought. “And if Gwen has had to leave Hobgoblin then he’ll be desperate because he’s got a dream of an off-season charter at the moment—a whole lot of scuba fanatics from Germany, and I know he’d love them to book again next year—but I tell you, Nick, he would have called me if there had been a real problem with Gwen because I’m the one who would have had to arrange her replacement.”

“But not if you were in Nassau?”

“He’d have called me!” she said patiently.

It was hopeless. I stared down at the verandah’s wide floorboards as Julie tried to cheer me up. “She’ll turn up, Nick! Ellen’s an independent girl!”

“Yeah, she’ll turn up,” I said without enthusiasm or belief.

“You want some lunch? Soup and a spam sandwich? Warmed-up baby muck? Minced turnips and custard? Name your pleasure.”

I shook my head. The gun was a hard lump in my back. “Can I use the phone?”

“Go ahead.” She hospitably waved me towards the house.

“It’s only to call a taxi.” I was reassuring her that I was not planning to call London.

“Where are you going?”

“To the Maggot’s house.”

“You don’t want to pay for a taxi.” She stood up. “We’ll pile the half-and-halves in the back of the van and I’ll drive you. It will be nice to see the Maggot’s ugly face again.”

“I don’t want to be a nuisance.”

“Shut up and hold this.” ‘This’ was the baby, which took one look at my face and burst into tears.

I prayed to God the Maggot was home. I had searched everywhere and found nothing, but the Maggot had been with Ellen on the day she had disappeared so if anyone knew what had happened to her, then surely the Maggot was that person.

If the Maggot himself was still alive. Which now we drove to find out.

The Maggot’s house was built in a filthy section of a failed and dilapidated industrial park which was a wasteland of used cars, broken buildings, and toxic wastes. A tidal creek wound its way through this depressing landscape, but it would have been stretching matters to say that the creek was filled with water; it was in fact a noxious sludge of mud-edged chemical horror. The Maggot’s house overlooked this oil-slicked sump, in which his fishing boat was berthed, thus enabling him to boast of his ‘sea-views’. He claimed that the neighbourhood could only improve, and that its undoubted proximity to the sea made his ‘house’ into a prime investment.

The prime investment had once been a frozen-food warehouse, which meant that its only windows were in the old upstairs offices facing the creek. The rest of the building had hugely thick concrete walls and heavy steel doors which suitably protected the Maggot’s rare collection of firearms. Yet even the Maggot was dimly aware that living within a concrete and steel box was not wholly desirable, so he had bought some lumber from one of the failed businesses in the industrial park and made himself a verandah on the creek side of the box. From the verandah he enjoyed a fine view of the oil-storage facilities on the far bank of the chemical soup.

Julie braked outside this elegant dwelling that still carried a faded sign on its gate ordering deliveries to the left and collections to the right. There was no sign of the Maggot’s red Firebird, indeed the only sign of life was the Maggot’s immense Rottweiler that began barking and chewing at the chain-link fence as soon as Julie’s van stopped by the gate. I wound down the window. “Tatum! Shut your face!”

Tatum was reputed to kill anyone who did not know his name, but merely slobbered over those who did. The dog now whined and writhed with the pleasure at being recognised. The huge beast certainly did not look starved, but that did not mean the Maggot was at home, for I knew he had an arrangement whereby someone came by and hurled offal over the fence when he was away. “The place looks kind of deserted,” Julie said uneasily. “Are you sure you want to wait here?”

The place seemed more than deserted; there was even an air of menace in its stillness, but I was desperate to see the Maggot, so I said I would wait. “Will you let me pay for your petrol?” I asked Julie.

“Get out of here, Nick Breakspear!” She laughed, offered me a kiss, then enjoined me not to be a stranger.

I climbed into the heat as the half-and-halves chorused their obedient goodbyes. “Invite me to your wedding!” Julie shouted, then she grated the worn gears as she drove the half-and-halves off for the treat of an ice-cream.

Tatum was shivering with the anticipation of having someone to swamp in dog-dribble. The gate was chained and padlocked, but I knew the Maggot kept the key under a chunk of concrete that anchored one of the fence posts, so I found it, let myself in, and was immediately assaulted by half a ton of amorous Rottweiler. It was like being raped by a fur-coated Sherman tank, but I fought the brute off and, inch by inch, made progress towards the verandah stairs. Tatum finally allowed me to climb to the broad deck with its seductive views across the skim of oil that made a shimmering prism of the creek’s surface. Bronco-Buster, the Maggot’s long-decked fishing boat, was berthed at the end of a short concrete wall that carried a sewage overflow pipe to its outfall into the creek. The smell of the sludge was fairly overpowering, but this was high summer and, as the Maggot liked to say, you could not expect a prime real-estate investment to have everything.

A second key was hidden on one of the rafters that supported the verandah’s canvas roof. That second key fitted a padlock which secured what had once been an upstairs office window, and was now a makeshift entryway into the Maggot’s kitchen. I struggled through the metal frame, then helped myself to a beer from the refrigerator and a tin of tuna from a cupboard. A steel door led from the kitchen into the rest of the house, but the Maggot did not make the key to that door available to casual visitors. He reasoned that his friends were welcome to drop by when he was not at home and more than welcome to avail themselves of his verandah, kitchen, beer, and scenic views, but he would keep the rest of his house private, and thus the steel door stayed locked unless the Maggot was in residence.

I opened the beer and the tuna, found a fork, and took my makeshift lunch back to the verandah. I extracted the gun from my waistband, not as a precaution, but because it was uncomfortable, and laid it on a wicker table. I sat in the Maggot’s favourite chair, which he had bought from a company that specialised in dismantling old aircraft; this particular chair had come from a Boeing B52’s cockpit and was wondrously comfortable.

The oil-storage tanks quivered in the heat. The scum on the creek slowly curdled the shimmering oil. The tide was dropping, leaving a greasy gunge on the newly exposed rocks that lined the channel. Rats scuttled along the near bank. The Maggot liked to sit on this verandah with some of his guns and blow the rats away, but for every one he killed it seemed a dozen came back. That was another reason the Maggot liked this house; he could fire guns to his heart’s content and no one complained of the noise for no one lived anywhere near. A few people worked in what was left of the industrial park, but only the Maggot lived here. I drank the top off the beer, and waited for the rest to reach a decent temperature. Tatum had gone to sleep in the shade under the verandah’s deck.

A truck whined and rattled on the road that was hidden from me by the bulk of the Maggot’s house. Nothing more moved for a half-hour until a car came up the road, and I hoped it was the Maggot, but instead the car drove into the warehouse next door where solvents were stored. I went back to the aircraft seat and stared at the tank farm across the creek.

I did not want to admit the possibility, but suppose Ellen was dead? Suppose the Maggot had died with her? Perhaps they had been ambushed after leaving the Literacy Project office when they were on their way to Addendum’s marina, except that surely such an ambush would have made the newspapers? So perhaps they were alive? Perhaps their car had been stopped and they had been taken away at gunpoint? Supposing she was alive and…I could not even face that contingency, and I momentarily closed my eyes tight as though I could drive the horror of such a fate out of my mind.

Maybe nothing had happened to her? Maybe she had just wanted to visit her friends in America? Perhaps she had gone back to the university where she had taught? I tempted myself with hope, while beneath me Tatum whined in his sleep, then growled softly. I tipped the beer bottle to my mouth.

I tried to reassure myself that the Maggot would soon be home, booming with life and obscenities, telling me that Ellen had abruptly changed her mind and decided to fly to the United States. Perhaps she had sent me a postcard from the airport, which postcard would even now be waiting in the tiny post office on Straker’s Cay. The Maggot always called it Streaker’s Cay. He had a nickname for everything. The Denver Fairies, the Chicago Chicken-shits, the Philadelphia Sugar Plums, the Tampa Bay…

Tatum barked, breaking my idle chain of thoughts and bringing me bolt upright in the pilot’s seat. The barking was frantic, but when the dog paused to draw breath I heard the twang of a chain fence under stress off to my right, and I turned that way, but could see nothing until Tatum suddenly appeared from under the verandah, accelerating into killing speed, and barking as he went; then the poor dog just seemed to disintegrate into blood, fur and offal as a shotgun crashed obscenely loud, and I realised that men must be breaking through the wire out of my sight round the corner of the house. I snatched up the gun and dropped to the floor. The violence of my motion spilt the heavy chair on to its side. I left it, crawling instead to the verandah’s edge. Tatum was a bloody mess on the dirt, but at least the dog had died instantly and was not twitching and whining in agony.

The property beyond the chain-link fence was a dumping ground for dead cars. The sun reflected dazzlingly from a myriad scraps of peeling chrome. I could see no one trying to cut their way through the fence, nor any gaps already cut in the wire. I could see no one at all, but then the shotgun fired again from its vantage point among the wrecked cars.

The shotgun fired a third time, pumped, fired once more, then fired a last time. The shots filled the stench-laden air with noise and swamped the verandah with a storm of lead pellets that whipped overhead, smashing the glass of a hurricane lamp that hung from the verandah’s rafters, but otherwise doing no harm. I was down behind the heavy timbers of the balustrade. There were small gaps between the timbers that let me watch the car graveyard, but I still could not see my enemies.

All I could see were the heaps of rusting cars and the unbroken chain-link fence. Nothing more. I realised I was holding my breath, so I let it slowly out. I was alive. I was unhurt. I fumbled in my trouser pocket, found a handful of bullets, and loaded all six of the Webley’s chambers. I cocked the gun, then looked again through my small loophole. Tatum’s body was already busy with flies. Paraffin was dripping from the punctured reservoir of the hurricane lamp behind me. I could see no gunman at the chain-link fence.

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. The dog had been attracted to the fence because of the noise of the wire being cut or stretched, yet the fence was undamaged and my attackers had evidently retreated into the piles of scrapped cars, and I suddenly realised that they had merely used the noise of the fence as a decoy to draw the dog and my attention one way while they attacked from the other, and I rolled on to my back, sat up, and levelled the gun towards the top of the second flight of stairs which led up to the far side of the verandah. I was aware of being frightened, but I noted that my hands were utterly still.

I could not see if anyone was climbing those far stairs. Nor could I see the concrete wall which edged the left-hand side of the property. That wall formed the rear of the small warehouse complex in which the industrial solvents were stored. I had watched a car roll into that yard only moments before, but I had thought nothing of it. The warehouse had a corrugated tin roof. Doubtless my enemies had crossed the roof under the cover of the shotgun’s fusillade, and were now approaching the verandah. Would they assault the stairs or try to fire up through the stout timbers of the deck? I dismissed the latter fear. I knew I had to concentrate on the likeliest threat, eliminate it, then worry about what else the ungodly might do.

The fear was quivering in me. The beer and tuna were acid-sour in my belly, my left leg was shivering, my bowels were like water, my heart was racing; yet I had a gun, and my hands were rock steady, and I reasoned that I was facing the men who had hurt or killed Ellen, and all my consciousness seemed trained on the patch of light that marked the top of the far stairs. I was in shadow, but anyone who attacked me must come through that light and thus make themselves a target. That thought gave me confidence.

Except they threw a grenade instead.

I saw its silhouette and knew I had lost.

Except they threw too hard and the grenade thumped against one of the rafters and dropped sharply down to lodge just behind the solid lump of the Maggot’s fallen aircraft chair, which now protected me like a blast wall. I was counting the seconds since the grenade had appeared. I opened my mouth to equalise the blast and drew up my knees to protect my midriff, but I did not take the gun away from the bright space at the top of the far stairs.

Which bright space was suddenly cracked apart with noise and flame. The canvas roof billowed, ripped and tore away as hot air punched at me with an appalling violence, but no shrapnel came at me. The heavy pilot’s chair slid six feet towards me, and the table was blown on to its side, but I was unhurt. The spilt paraffin had caught fire, its flames flickering across the verandah’s deck. The sound of the explosion still echoed, and it was during that echo that my attackers charged up the far stairs.

I could not see them clearly, for the sunlight was too bright and I was half dazed by the explosion, but a part of my brain had gone back into its training and it was telling my body what to do. My enemies were charging up the steps and one of them was shouting like a fiend either to give himself courage or to intimidate me. I could only hear the one voice, but two pairs of boots. I also knew that my attackers would not see me immediately for I was in shadow, and the verandah was a chaos of fallen furniture, flame and smoke, and that blessed small scrap of my brain that had been programmed in the lethal skills of soldiering told me to hold my fire until I was certain of a kill.

The first man, the one who was shouting, hurled himself on to the verandah. He was a young black man, short-haired, muscular, and carrying a Kalashnikov. I unthinkingly registered the distinctive shape of the curved magazine, and I saw the muzzle’s pale flames pricking the brightness as he began spraying the verandah with bullets, but like most inexperienced men he was firing too high. I knew there was a second man behind him, and I guessed the second man was the marksman. The first man had been committed to draw my attention, while the second was the expert, the executioner who would kill me while I was distracted by his noisy companion, so I shifted the heavy Webley a fraction to the right and waited for the second man, and I did not otherwise move a muscle, because movement attracts fire, and I waited for a full second while the first man hammered the verandah with bullets. I was inwardly gibbering with fear as I waited, but then the second man appeared. He could have been the first man’s twin brother. He panned his rifle round the verandah, saw me, and shouted a warning to the first man who had still not spotted me. I pulled the trigger.

I was terrified, yet still the training held good. I was using both hands to steady the gun and I had taken my time. I had given myself all of a half-second to aim, and at that range a trained soldier could not miss, and I fired, and I saw the bullet shatter the second man’s throat and his shout turned into a wet gulp as he became airborne, flying backwards, his blood filling the open verandah in a sickening spray that was turned to incandescent red by the sunlight. The first man began to turn his gun back towards me, but the hammerlike recoil of the Kalashnikov’s automatic fire had been spinning his body and his aim away from me, while my arms had already soaked the massive blow of the revolver and were steady again and I knew he was going to fall to his right in a desperate attempt to escape me, so I fired that way and saw the dark fleck where the bullet hit his ribs. His whole chest quivered with the seismic shock of the bullet’s strike. The blow thumped him hard against the cement-block wall of the Maggot’s house, and there he stayed, suddenly leaning on the wall with dull eyes staring at me and the now silent gun hanging by his side.

Then he sighed. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and he looked as though he was going to cry. He tried to lift the rifle, but it was as heavy as lead in his nerveless hand. He suddenly looked very young and very sad, like a child deprived of a toy. There were tears in his eyes that brimmed, then poured down his cheeks. He stared reproachfully at me, then made one last supreme effort to lift his assault rifle. I watched the muzzle rise towards me, felt the sudden panic, and so I fired a last time. The Webley’s heavy bullet obliterated the man’s face, wiping away his tears for ever. He slid down the wall, leaving a slime of blood on the concrete.

Silence. The paraffin flames flickered blue. Bile was sour in my throat. Sweat stung my eyes. I noticed that my hands had begun to shake.

I thanked God they had not been waiting in ambush when Julie had dropped me at the gate, for God knows what slaughter they would have made had they fired at her van. But how had these men known where to find me? That was not a difficult question to answer, for I had spent all day telling people that I could be reached at the Maggot’s house, and doubtless my enemies had known ever since early morning that I was on the island. Who else could Bellybutton have telephoned? And who had he phoned? Billingsley? But if the policeman wanted me dead, why had he not killed me when I was in custody? Because too many questions would have been asked as a result of such a death. The conjectures flickered through my consciousness, even as I listened for a sound, any sound, that would betray the next move of my enemies.

If they made any move at all, other than to escape, for they must have realised that their first attack had failed disastrously. If they had any sense they would cut and run now, just as I should cut and run before the police arrived. I expected the police at any moment, for surely someone must have heard the gunfire and called the authorities? I could smell blood. So much blood. Dog blood and man blood. The world stank of blood and burning kerosene; a mingling stench that even overpowered the reek from the channel behind me.

I rolled over, expecting a shotgun blast.

Nothing. The first man I had shot was out of my sight, blown back down the steps, but the second was still lying slumped at the foot of the wall. He was dressed in black fatigues. I edged across to him, skirting the paraffin flames, and took his Kalashnikov, which was the East German version with the pimply black plastic stock. The gun was sticky with the dead man’s blood, which I tried to wipe away. I took the two spare magazines that were jammed into a pouch attached to his webbing belt. The paraffin had set fire to the wicker mats that carpeted the verandah and the flames were suddenly brighter and fiercer.

I changed the assault rifle’s magazine. That gave me thirty rounds. I was crouching low. Puddled in the dead man’s blood were some cartridges ejected from the Kalashnikov. They were made of green-lacquered steel like those I had found on Hirondelle so long ago. That coincidence did not mean that these men had also killed Hirondelle’s crew because the Eastern bloc, just like the West, was flooding the world with weapons. Talking peace is good for a politician’s image, but selling weapons is good for employment figures and foreign earnings. I was moving towards the side of the verandah which faced the car graveyard, towards the chain-link fence. No police had come yet.

The heat of the burning wicker was increasing and its smoke was thickening, but that smoke was not going to help me because it was rising into the air instead of clinging to the ground like a screen. The burning wicker would drive me off the verandah, but only into the aim of the surviving gunmen. To burn or be shot? I was as indecisive as Hamlet. Be shot, I decided, and so I stood up, keeping my back against the wall of Maggot’s house and pushed the Webley into my trouser pocket. Nothing moved in the yard of scrapped cars. I could just see the far-off open sea above the piles of shimmering crushed metal. My back hurt where the pellets had hit me on board Wavebreaker; those shotgun pellets had all been removed and the wounds were almost healed, yet suddenly they felt raw and painful.

I cocked the Kalashnikov. I used to teach marines how to strip and fire a Kalashnikov, the theory being that one day they might have to fight with captured weapons. The Kalashnikov was a good gun. You could stamp on it, burn it, drown it, and still it goes on working. I edged down the stairs, expecting the blast of a shotgun at any second. The stench of dog blood was thick, and the buzz of flies even thicker. Sweat trickled down my face and stung my eyes. I cuffed it away. No one fired. I reached the ground and ran like a hare to the sewage outfall wall where Bronco-Buster was moored. The wall’s top was curved, like an arch over a pipe, and the concrete was crumbling. The stink of sewage and oil and smoke and blood was overpowering. I stumbled desperately off the wall’s curvature to land heavily on Bronco-Buster’s aft deck. She was thirty-two feet long, had a flying bridge and a tattered fighting chair that did not look strong enough to withstand the tug of a stickleback. I crouched in her open wheelhouse, watching the shore.

Fire and smoke still showed on the verandah, but much more feebly now, for the wicker mats had burned out and the rest of the structure was built of timbers so massive that it would need a blowtorch to set them on fire. The charred remnants of the canvas awning, blown ragged by the grenade, lifted in the warm and idle wind. I doubted that the flames would spread to the Maggot’s house, for the old cold-store was built of materials that would not ignite easily.

Still no police had come. Nothing living moved except three turkey vultures that circled overhead. I was slowly concluding that I was safe, that no gunmen were left to fire at me, but that did not mean I could relax. The police must surely come, and to avoid their questions I decided to take Bronco-Buster to sea, though that notion depended on the boat’s engine starting. I decided I would run for Straker’s Cay. I could think of nowhere else to go. It was not safe to stay here, for my enemies would be sure to return, and if not my enemies than it would be the police. All that was left was to salvage Masquerade and go. There was nothing else. No Ellen.

I thought I heard a car accelerate away, but was not certain. I waited ten more minutes, then straightened up in the wheelhouse. No one fired at me. Bronco-Buster’s engine and fuel tanks were all under padlocked hatches and her ignition needed a key, which meant I would have to hot-wire the boat, but first I had to make sure she was fuelled. I used the Kalashnikov’s flash suppressor as a jemmy, ripping a hasp and padlock out of the spongy wood to lift a locker lid and reveal the boat’s main fuel tank.

She was almost empty. A sight glass ran down beside the big fifty-gallon fuel tank, and it showed hardly a quarter inch of fuel remaining. That was just enough to reach McIllvanney’s yard where I would beg, borrow or steal Starkisser.

I began levering at the engine hatch, needing to turn on the seacocks that fed the motor’s cooling system, when I heard the creak of the Maggot’s gate. I looked up.

The Maggot had come home at last. I felt an avalanche of relief crash through me as I watched him climb out of his red Firebird to open the gates, then I shouted to warn him that gunmen might still be lurking in ambush, but he was too far away to hear me over the sound of his car’s engine so I fired the Kalashnikov into the air, and that alerted him. He dived back into the Firebird and I saw him leaning towards the glove compartment, presumably to find a gun.

I clambered off the boat on to the awkward slope of the wall. The Maggot accelerated into his yard, his tyres spinning a smokescreen of dust into the humid air. No one fired at him. He skidded the car to a stop beside the body of his dead Rottweiler. Flies buzzed. The Maggot did not spare the dog a glance, but just ran up the verandah steps with a fire extinguisher he had snatched from his car. “What the hell happened?” he shouted at me.

“Where the hell’s Ellen?” I shouted back. Fire hissed as the Maggot released the chemical extinguisher. A noxious mist, foul as the stench of the creek, reeked away from the verandah. “Where’s Ellen?” I shouted again as I reached the foot of the verandah steps.

“Ellen?” The Maggot turned and frowned at me as though he did not really understand the basis of my question. “She’s with you, isn’t she? That’s where she said she was going!”

And with those words all hope went.

“We went to her apartment, OK? She fetched her things, went on to the Literacy Project, then she reckoned that she didn’t want to sail that heap of junk to the Keys, but wanted to go back to you, so I dropped her off at the ferry terminal.”

“You just left her there?”

“Sure! She insisted she was OK.” The Maggot, kicking the last sparks of the fire dead, sensed my unspoken criticism that he should have been more protective, and that he should even have flown Ellen back to Straker’s Cay. “I had a booking to fly three Venezuelans to Rodentworld.” Rodentworld was the Maggot’s nickname for Disneyworld; so called because it was the place where people dressed as mice to welcome the tourists. “The charter had been booked for weeks, Nick,” he went on defensively, “and I couldn’t let them down.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” It was unfair to blame the Maggot for what had happened. He had done his best.

“And frankly—” he forced a very unconvincing laugh, “Ellen wasn’t really happy in my company. You know how she reacts to me? Like I was something thrown up by a hog?” He backed down off the verandah that was still wreathed in smoke and fumes, though the last of the flames had been extinguished.

“Ellen never arrived at Straker’s Cay,” I told the Maggot, but then a sudden and searing pulse of hope shot through me. “Unless she’s there now? Maybe she arrived after I left?”

The Maggot shook his head. “I’ve just come from there. I went looking for you.” He had gone to the body of the gunman who had fallen backwards down the stairs and now he crouched beside the bloody corpse to search its pockets. This dead gunman, like the other, was dressed in the quasi-military black fatigues.

“You went looking for me?” I asked the Maggot.

“That senator—Crowninshield—wants to see you,” the Maggot explained carelessly, as though US senators were always demanding my company, then he suddenly cursed and twitched back from the dead body as though it had bitten him.

“What?”

“Jesus!” The Maggot tossed me the wallet he had taken from a pocket of the fatigues. Till now the Maggot had displayed a remarkable insouciance in the face of the flames and death that had polluted his house, but now he was suddenly showing real alarm.

The wallet was stuffed with money, but it was not the cash that had alarmed the Maggot. It was the warrant card. The dead man with the flies in his mouth was a policeman. I had just shot a policeman. I had probably just shot two policemen.

“Oh, my God.” I was shaking.

The Maggot stood up. His red Firebird made a ticking noise as its engine cooled, but otherwise there was silence. The other gunman or gunmen had fled. The gate of the warehouse yard was open and tyre tracks showed on the road where they had spun their wheels in their hurry to get away. They had left their dead behind. Dead policemen. The Maggot stepped backwards. He was going to abandon me, I was sure of it and I could not blame him.

“Deacon Billingsley,” the Maggot suddenly said.

“That’s not Billingsley,” I said. I was still shaking. It was slowly dawning on me just how much trouble I was in. The world had jumped its gears. Just a month ago I had been helping to film a Pussy-Cute commercial, and my biggest worry had been keeping the bloody cats from marooning themselves up Wavebreaker’s rigging; now I was a cop-killer and that meant an eternity in jail, or even worse. “Do they have capital punishment in the Bahamas?”

“Billingsley must have sent them.” The Maggot had taken the wallet back from me and was pulling out the wads of money. “For God’s sake, Nick, think! You were a witness to Thessy’s murder. They want to get rid of all the witnesses.”

I stared at the gunman. Flies were thick on the awful throat wound. “They weren’t here on police business?” I asked, still in shock.

“Of course they were not damn well here on police business.” The Maggot had grabbed the corpse by its boots and was dragging it under the smoking verandah where it would be hidden from the road. “Even the Bahamian Police are not yet officially drug-smugglers. And for God’s sake, don’t just stand there! Help me get the hell out of here!”

“Help?” It was dawning on me that the Maggot was not going to leave me to my grim fate, but was planning on helping me. I felt a flood of gratitude for the huge man.

“Sooner or later their pals will come looking.” The Maggot found his keys and unlocked the door. “So for Christ’s sake, let’s go!”

He began hauling green canvas bags from inside his house and told me to stack them into the boot of his car. The bags were heavy and clanked metallically, as though they were filled with golf clubs, then I realised the Maggot was rescuing the best of his astonishing gun collection. “Are you abandoning this place?” I asked him.

He paused for a second. “Two dead policemen in my house? You bet I’m getting the hell out of here.” He tossed out two plastic garbage bags of clothes, a briefcase, then a silver-framed photograph that showed a delicately beautiful brunette dressed in a body-stocking and leg warmers. He had plainly been prepared to make a moonlight flight, knowing just which possessions he wanted to rescue and which he wanted to abandon. Then, leaving the house door open, he shouted at me to get in the car.

I still held the photograph. The engine snapped into life, the back wheels spewed dirt and dust as the Maggot let out the clutch, then we were fishtailing out of his compound and on to the road. He accelerated away.

I looked at the portrait. The girl had a fragile loveliness, raven-dark hair, bright eyes, and an impudently cheerful smile. Her body was lithe and taut. “Pittsburgh?” I asked the Maggot.

“Yeah.” He spun the wheel hard and I heard the guns shift in the boot.

“She’s very beautiful,” I said in real tribute.

“Yeah. Except now she’s giving blow jobs in the back room of a peep-show.” The Maggot’s voice was grim as death. “That picture was taken before she found cocaine. They don’t look so damn good afterwards.”

God damn it. I closed my eyes as though I could obliterate the misery in darkness. Ellen. The thought of her suddenly swamped me, making me want to cry. She had tried to catch a ferry to come back to me, and it was from the ferry that Jackson Chatterton had been pushed to his death. It had all gone wrong.

And now we were running.

We loaded everything into the Maggot’s Beechcraft. That, at least, he could take with him when he left the Grand Bahamas, though he was resigned to losing the car. He was fond of his Firebird. It had a bumper sticker which read ‘This Might Not Be The Mayflower, But Your Daughter Came Across In It.’ The Maggot tried to peel the bumper sticker away, claiming he might never find another like it, but the paper tore in his big fingers.

“For Christ’s sake!” I snapped. “Let’s get out of here!”

“I’ve got to file a flight plan yet. You wait.” He at last abandoned the bumper sticker and, snatching up a chart and a pile of papers, strode away towards the airport buildings.

I climbed into the Beechcraft. It was like a Turkish bath inside the plane, which was standing in the full sunlight, but at least I had the illusion of being hidden. I was nevertheless scared, expecting to hear the visceral wail of a police siren at any second. I watched a helicopter come beating in from the north, its rotors flashing light, and I was sure that it was bringing men to arrest me. I slunk down in my seat as the machine landed not far from the Maggot’s plane. I waited for the helicopter to disgorge uniformed men, but instead a hugely fat man in Bermuda shorts climbed out of the helicopter and, without a glance in my direction, walked away.

The Maggot seemed to have disappeared. Sweat was pouring off me. By now, I thought, the police would have found the bodies of their two colleagues. They must have found the bodies. The men who had fled the scene must surely have reported the killings and my description was doubtless already clattering out of telex machines in dozens of police stations across the islands. It was such an easy description: just look for Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. “Shit, shit, shit!” I swore aloud, pounding the plane’s broken dashboard, willing the Maggot to reappear from the control tower. He still did not come.

Two black men in white overalls strolled towards the Firebird. They stood admiring the car’s lines. The overalls were too clean, I decided. Each man wore the logo of an oil company, but I was sure they were policemen. One of the men lit a cigarette. Where the hell was the Maggot? I shrank down in the seat.

Ellen was gone. I had lost Masquerade. All I could now hope for was to get out of the islands alive, and then to run from the extradition lawyers. It was my own fault. Ellen had warned me not to get involved with the drug lords; she had warned me on the morning I had found the floating wreckage of the Hirondelle, but I had not listened to her, and now she, like Thessy and Jackson Chatterton, was dead. Or probably dead. Or worse. I shivered suddenly, not with cold, but with horror. I knew my grief was in a kind of suspense and that when it came it would be hard to bear, but not so hard as the ordeal that Ellen must already have endured.

The two white-overalled men strolled away. I could hear them laughing. A big passenger jet thumped down on to the main runway. Its engines went into reverse thrust and the thunder bellowed across the field. Where the hell was the Maggot? “Jesus!” I swore impotently. “Come on! Come on!”

Then a police car drove into a car park just a hundred yards away and a uniformed constable climbed out. He stared directly at me, then, as though drawing out my torture, he yawned and stretched his cramped arms. I was tempted to run. Not only would I be charged with murder, but probably with gun-smuggling as well, for the Beechcraft was crammed with weapons. One of the guns, astonishingly, was a Kalashnikov PKM, the general-purpose Russian machine-gun, which the Maggot claimed to have bought off a collector in Florida. The Beechcraft even had boxes of ammunition for the Russian gun, each box containing belts of one hundred rounds. The rope-handled boxes, I noticed, were all labelled Oficina Ecónomica Cubana. Another bag held a clutch of little Czechoslovakian Scorpion sub-machine-guns, toylike weapons that were lethal at close quarters. What kind of a mind, I wondered, thought it important to salvage such things when doing a moonlight flit? And what kind of a man would strand me in his plane for so long? “Come on!” I encouraged the invisible Maggot.

The policeman turned and strolled towards the airport terminal. Dust blew across the tarmac. Ellen, Ellen, Ellen. The reality of her fate had not sunk in yet, or else the horror of what had happened to her was so great that my mind refused to face it. Sweetman had surely had her killed, or kidnapped. I tried to think of something I could do to find her, or to avenge her, but there was nothing. I was utterly helpless for I did not know where Jesse Sweetman was, and even if I did know I was not sure what I could do, and then I suddenly wondered just why the Maggot had been so certain that Deacon Billingsley had sent the policemen to kill me at his house. I had never learned of any connection between Sweetman and Billingsley, so why had the Maggot assumed there was?

The Maggot at last appeared in the far doorway. He strolled towards me as though he had all the time in the world, even stopping to chat to the men in white overalls, then wandering with blithe unconcern around the plane as he inspected its wings and tail. “Nothing’s fallen off,” he reassured me as he climbed into the cabin, “and we’ve got clearance for Fort Lauderdale.”

“Thank Christ for that.”

“Not that we’re going to Fort Lauderdale, of course. I thought we might visit Coffinhead Porter instead. Do you know Coffinhead?”

I knew Coffinhead, though not as well as the Maggot did. Coffinhead was a Bahamian who had become rich through years of lucrative smuggling, though of late he had retired to a small, but legitimate, marina in the Berry Islands from which he ran a very quick fishing boat and a fleet of diving boats. Coffinhead, whose nickname arose from his oddly elongated and boxlike skull, had sometimes helped out our charter clients by taking them to dive on some especially exotic coral reef, but so far as I knew Coffinhead Porter was not a lawyer, so he could not fight a murder charge on my behalf, and nor did Coffinhead Porter own an airline, so he could not fly me away from Deacon Billingsley’s vengeance. “Just why the hell are we going to see Coffinhead?” I asked the Maggot in a very bitter voice.

“Because Senator Crowninshield’s there, of course,” the Maggot said as though that was the most obvious answer in all the world, “so hold on to your underwear and we’ll see if this thing flies.”

The thing flew, and it felt wonderful as the wheels left the ground and, second by second, we climbed higher into a police-free sky. Yet I knew there would be more policemen wherever I landed, and I wondered if I would ever be free of their pursuit. I stared regretfully down at the impossibly blue sea that was scarred with the white wakes of pleasure boats and tried to make sense of all the things that had happened to me since the morning. Nothing clicked into place, nothing. “What on earth is Crowninshield doing at Coffinhead’s place?” I asked the Maggot.

“He wants to see you. Perhaps he likes you?” The Maggot offered me a suggestive simper.

“Maggot, what the hell is happening?”

He looked at me as though I was mad. “What the hell do you think is happening? The senator wants to get his children back. He’s asked me to help him, and I said I wouldn’t do it unless you were included in the fun and games. That’s why I know Ellen isn’t at Streaker’s Cay, because I went there to find you.”

“Does the senator know where the twins are?”

“Of course he does!” The Maggot was astonished that I needed to ask.

I felt the day’s first pulse of hope, though it was a very feeble pulse. If the senator knew where the twins were, then that was surely the place where Jesse Sweetman could be found, and where Jesse Sweetman was, so also was Ellen, if she was alive. As a straw it was not very strong, but it was something to cling on to all the same. “How the devil did the senator find out?” I asked.

“He didn’t find out. You did.” He banked towards the south, lancing bright sunlight across the cockpit. Cool air was at last venting out of the nozzles.

“I did?” The world was out of joint.

“There,” the Maggot pointed to one of the back seats where, among his papers and guns, a brown envelope lay.

I opened the envelope to find that it held a sheaf of black and white photographs. They were the pictures I had taken of Murder Cay on the last occasion that I had flown with the Maggot.

They were not good photographs. One was a distant view of the island, but the picture was so hazed by heat that it was difficult to see anything except the outline of surf and coral and a mass of palm trees on the island itself. There was a reasonable photograph of the dog-leg entrance channel, and there was a perfect picture of two of the island’s houses, which looked much bigger than I remembered, and both of which had lavish swimming pools, tennis courts, elegant landscaping, white stone terraces and satellite dishes on their pantiled roofs; but most of the other pictures were horribly blurred, though I could just make out one of the two trucks which had been parked to block the island’s runway and, beyond the truck, the elongated painted cross at the end of the airstrip.

“I grant you’re good at blowing away narcotraficantes,” the Maggot grinned at me, “but you’re pure dogshit with a camera.”

I grunted acknowledgement of that truth as I sifted quickly through the rest of the prints, many of which had been flared into obscurity by the bloom of the sun’s reflection on the plane’s windscreen. The very last picture in the pile was the one I had snapped just as the Maggot had desperately sideslipped to evade the machine-gun fire. As a consequence the picture was skewed and one edge was a blur which I assumed was a part of the plane’s cockpit. I had been trying to photograph the boats in the island’s anchorage, but all I had captured was a sailing yacht and a white working boat with a stubby little wheelhouse. The shadows of the boats showed dark on the pale clear sand of the lagoon’s bed. I looked at the Maggot who was lighting himself a cigarette. “So?” I asked. I had rarely seen a worse set of photographs, and I did not understand how they could possibly have identified Murder Cay as the place where the senator’s twins had taken refuge.

“Have a look at that last picture again,” the Maggot shouted above the engine noise. I looked. It was the skewed and blurred photograph which showed the yacht and the working boat. “How many boats can you see?” the Maggot asked me with evident enjoyment.

“Two.”

“And how many shadows on the lagoon bed?”

I looked, I counted, then I blasphemed. “Good God,” I said in wonderment.

“Bingo.” The Maggot grinned at me. “Two boats, but three shadows. Well snapped, Nick.”

I gazed at the photograph. At a casual glance there did indeed seem to be just the two boats in the picture, but three solid hulls were indisputably shadowed on the sandy sea-bed, and the moment I noticed that third shadow I saw the third boat that was floating just above and to one side of it. That third boat was a sports-fisherman which had been camouflaged with dazzle paint, and the camouflage had melded the boat into the sun-chopped water and rippled lagoon-bed sand with an extraordinary efficiency. It was Dream Baby and, once disentangled from her background, she was so glaringly obvious that I wondered how I had ever missed her with my first casual look. I could even make out the antennae splaying from her upperworks and the white straps on her fighting chair.

“You found Dream Baby,” the Maggot said. “She ain’t there now, of course, but she was the day that you and I flew over Murder Cay, and I’ll bet you a case of whores to a thimble of cold beer that your friend Sweetman lives on Murder Cay.”

And Billingsley, I remembered, had a house on Murder Cay, which explained why the Maggot had been so sure that the policeman was behind the attempt to murder me. It all made sense. Sweetman wanted to cover his tracks, and he had called in his favours from the big policeman to do it. And Ellen? I closed my eyes in sudden fear. “How do you know Dream Baby’s not there now?” I asked the Maggot in an attempt to take my mind off Ellen.

“Because the senator pulled strings in Washington, and he got some surveillance photographs taken two mornings ago. They’re in that blue folder.”

The folder bore the embossed seal of the Drug Enforcement Administration. I pulled it out from under the canvas bag that held the Russian machine-gun and extracted the photographs. The first picture showed the whole anchor-shaped island surrounded by the coral reefs of the Devil’s Necklace. The next picture was an oblique view of the eight lavish houses that were built on the anchor’s shank, then there was a set of prints showing details of the individual houses which, like the palaces of ancient Rome, were built about pillared courtyards. They had swimming pools, tennis courts, private docks, servants’ quarters and terraced views across the western part of the lagoon. The largest house was topped by a blunt tower which sported a small radar aerial. There had once been a ninth house, closer to the airstrip and built right on the beach, but at some time that house had been half demolished and its ruins now stood like some part-excavated archaeological site. The remaining eight houses all stood on the western side of the narrow spit of land, while the eastern half formed a long and narrow nine-hole golf course, complete with sand traps and beside which a skeletal radio mast sprang incongruously from a stretch of sandy wasteland.

The prints were all in colour. The shadows in the photographs stretched westward, and the sprinklers on the golf course were venting huge sprays that sparkled in the low-angled sunlight. None of the householders was visible, only their servants. A maid swept a tiled terrace with a besom. A black gardener watered urns of flowers, while another man scooped leaves from a swimming pool with a long-handled net. A cook washed some fruit in a back yard while, beside her on the edge of a well, a tabby cat yawned. Clearly none of the servants had been aware of the surveillance aircraft that must have been tens of thousands of feet high, yet still the pictures were of a startling clarity; I could even see a clutch of tennis balls lying discarded in the corner of a court, while in another photograph I could read the title of a newspaper, El Espectador, that had been discarded on an upholstered lounger beside a tiled pool. More ominous was the photograph of a jeep that had a half-inch Browning machine-gun mounted on a pintle in its rear bed.

“Some place, eh?” the Maggot said. “You have to be a drug-smuggler or a quarterback to be rich enough to own one of those houses.”

“And you think Sweetman owns them?”

“No!” The Maggot was scathing. “The island belongs to a Colombian family called the Colóns!” He grinned his pleasure at the Spanish name which was amusing only in English. “They manufacture cocaine and smuggle it to the Bahamas. Sweetman works for them, and the senator thinks he must own one of the houses. We do know that Deacon Billingsley and the cabinet minister have each got a house on the island, while the biggest house, the one with the radar aerial, belongs to the Colón family. You met Miguel Colón. He was the charmer who helped Sweetman sink your boat.”

And a charmer, I thought, who had arranged some wonderful insurance for his family. Not only did one of the Bahamas’ most senior policemen have a vacation mansion in this drug lord’s private paradise, but a cabinet minister was housed there as well. Doubtless the Americans would love to have searched Murder Cay; they would want to swamp the island with their screaming Blackhawk helicopters and Blue Thunder patrol boats, and send in drug-sniffing dogs and men in bullet-proof vests carrying bullhorns and rifles. The Americans doubtless wanted a mini Grenada or Panama and they would probably have arrested anyone on Murder Cay who was found in possession of so much as an unlicensed aspirin, but they were helpless as long as they needed Bahamian permission to operate on Bahamian soil, because the Colón family had the insurance of having a top policeman and a senior politician on their payroll.

“So”—I looked at the Maggot—“the senator is going in on his own?”

“No.” The Maggot grinned. “He wants us to go in with him.”

“Jesus,” I said; not swearing, but praying. I was thinking of that half-inch Browning mounted on the jeep pintle.

The Maggot grinned at me. “The senator’s paying well! And if you’re anything like me then a bit of cash won’t come amiss.”

But I would not help the senator because of his money. Instead I was remembering my feeble straw of hope that perhaps Ellen was still alive and being held captive by Sweetman. The hope blossomed impossibly, for I could not bear to think of her dead. I stared westwards across the heat-hazed sea. Somewhere over there was the island where perhaps Ellen was being held. Perhaps. Beneath me, their prows sharp as blades, American warships sliced the blue water to cream.

Twenty minutes later the Beechcraft’s wheels thumped down from the wings as we circled to get downwind of our landing field. I felt the sweat prickle at my skin. I was frightened that the police would be waiting for me. “Fear not”—the Maggot sensed my apprehension—“for I am with thee.” He grinned, then launched into his customary litany of landing. “Thank you for flying Maggovertski Airways; please return the stewardess her pantyhose and restore her to the upright position, and kindly pray that the tyres don’t blow.”

The wheels bounced and spewed smoke.

The tyres did not shred on the coral, nor were any police waiting. There was only a taxi that we loaded with the guns, and which then took us to find the senator.

George Crowninshield was waiting for us in the palm-thatched office of Coffinhead’s small marina. He looked horribly out of place for, despite his media-advisers’ insistence that he dress in cowboy boots and drench his speeches in down-home folksiness, he was not a man who was at home with the common folk. The senator was more of a white-wine-and-finger-food politician than a cakes-and-ale populist. He was also missing his herd of advisers and aides, for he was quite alone in the small office. “I’m not here on official business,” he explained his solitary state, “but privately, just as I was when I first came to see you about the twins.” He shook my hand. “Thank you for coming, Nick. Truly, thank you.”

I forbore to say that two dead Bahamian policemen had given me small choice in the matter. Instead I shrugged away his thanks and asked just what exactly he wanted of me. “I don’t want any trouble, Nick, you understand that? No trouble! I just want to visit Murder Cay tonight and talk to the twins and see if they’ll come away.” He stared through the window to where the Maggot was unloading the green canvas bags from the boot of the taxi. “And it would be just great if you could come and help me,” the senator added.

I thought of the fearsome firepower that the Colón family would undoubtedly unleash in defence of Murder Cay. “Why don’t you just telephone the twins?” I asked him.

“I’ve tried.” The poor man was desperately nervous, but that was understandable for it was not every day that a father sought a confrontation with drug-runners. “There’s only one telephone line on to the island and the man who answers pretends not to understand me. I even had a Spanish-speaking staff member try for me, but she got nowhere. We were lucky,” he suddenly added.

“Lucky?” I did not follow the train of thought.

“That the photograph you took showed that camouflaged boat.”

The senator was even luckier, I thought, that the Maggot had thought to inform him of the photograph. Which was odd, in a way, for the Maggot seemed to have no liking for the senator. “Are you quite sure the twins are on the island?” I asked the senator.

“It seems the obvious solution.” Crowninshield was sweating profusely. “We think that Rickie wants to buy one of the empty houses. He could live in a drug heaven, you see, but he can’t have bought the house yet because he doesn’t inherit his money till next week.”

“And is that why we’re going to Murder Cay?” I challenged him. “To protect your family’s fortune? And to make sure you don’t lose the half-million dollars you put up for Rickie’s bail?”

Crowninshield looked angry and flushed, and I thought for a second that he was about to protest at my accusations, but instead he suddenly seemed to crumple inside. “Probably,” he admitted, “and why not? You think I should just let the money go?”

I had nothing to say, so kept silent. The senator frowned at me, seeking to broaden his justification for going to Murder Cay. “But it isn’t just money, Nick. If there was no money involved, and only my children’s lives at stake, I’d still go. Even if by going I lose my career, it’s still something I have to do.” He stopped, evidently seeking words that would convince me, and when he spoke again his voice was more measured, as though making the speech was calming his frayed nerves. “I simply want to reach my children and talk to them, Nick, and perhaps persuade them to make another effort to live without drugs. I’m not going as a senator, I’m not doing anything official, I’m just a father trying to save his kids.” He smiled ruefully, offering a glimpse of his famous charm. “Everyone on my staff says I’m mad. They say that what I’m doing today is political suicide, and perhaps it is, but Robin-Anne and Rickie are my kids, and no one else will save them.”

There had been a noble and convincing ring of truth to his words, but I was still not wholly persuaded. “And the twins are worth the White House?”

He stared at me, a half-frown of puzzlement on his handsome face. “You’re not a father?”

“No.”

“If you were a father,” he said heavily, “you would know.”

The door of the office opened and the Maggot, grinning broadly, staggered in under the weight of the assorted machine-guns and ammunition, which he dumped on Coffinhead’s table. George Crowninshield scowled at the awesome display of weaponry. “I’m sure we’re not going to need all that firepower, Mr Maggovertski.”

“The trick of kicking ass, senator, is to equip yourself with a very heavy boot. And some bullet-proof vests.” The Maggot carried three flak-jackets that he now added to the arsenal.

Like the senator I stared with some alarm at the guns. “I thought you didn’t want any trouble.”

“I suppose we ought to be ready for trouble?” the senator said tentatively.

“Then buy some yachting smoke-flares off Coffinhead,” I advised him, “because if those bastards start shooting then the best thing we can do is hide, not shoot back. Or else we get in the plane and get the hell out of there!”

“We’re not flying there,” the Maggot said. “Remember those trucks they keep parked on the runway? If we fly there, Nick, we’ll all be hamburger meat by midnight. No, we’re renting one of Coffinhead’s inflatables.”

“Which is why we wanted your help,” the senator said, “to navigate for us? And of course we would appreciate your advice.” Using one of Coffinhead’s inflatable boats made good sense.

Coffinhead used the boats to carry diving parties to the coral reefs, but they were not much different from the rigid-raider assault boats I had used in the Marines. The big boats were fast, but best of all their rubberised gunwales gave very little purchase to a radar impulse, and that could be important for Murder Cay was equipped with radar. I sorted through the DEA’s colour surveillance photographs until I found the picture which showed the radar aerial mounted on the tower of the biggest house. I was trying to tell from the size of the aerial just how sensitive the island’s radar would be.

The senator divined my worry. He had another identical blue file at his elbow, and now he opened it and leafed through the papers inside. “We’ve registered that radar’s electronic signature, Nick, and we know that it operates at ten thousand megahertz on a three-centimetre wavelength with a zero point five microsecond pulse length.”

“Oh, thank God for that,” the Maggot said with heavy sarcasm, “I thought it might be a problem.”

“What he means,” I explained, “is that it’s a recreational radar, like the kind you see on weekend powerboats, but it’s still dangerous.”

“But the inflatable boat—” the senator began.

“Will probably slip under that radar without being noticed,” I confirmed for him. Inflatables, with their curved hull shape and low freeboard, were notoriously hard to detect on radar. “But vanishing from the radar doesn’t mean that you’ll reach the island. It’s going to be dark tonight! There’s not much moon. How the hell do you think you’re going to see the channel?”

“With these.” The Maggot smiled and held up a pair of passive night-goggles.

“I think we’ve anticipated most of the problems,” the senator said modestly. He paused then, hoping to hear my assent, for I had still not told either man that I would travel to Murder Cay that night. I kept silent and the senator translated that silence as a reluctance to help him, so he took out the big photograph which showed the whole of the island and used it to demonstrate the foolproof nature of his plan. “We thought we’d land there”—he pointed to a small beach which lay close to the radio aerial and very near to the entrance channel—“and we hoped that you would stay with the boat, Nick, while we cross the golf course in an attempt to find Rickie and Robin-Anne…” He hesitated, then offered me an oddly strained smile, “And you can be sure that we’ll seek news of Ellen as well, and if we discover that she’s being held against her will then we’ll call for help. No one can hold an American citizen prisoner without due process.”

“Hold on!” I said. I had not told the senator anything at all about Ellen’s disappearance. “How did you know she’s missing?” I asked him, and could not hide the tone of accusation.

“Because I told him,” the Maggot admitted cheerfully. “I telephoned from the control tower before we left Freeport!”

“Of course.” I felt very foolish.

“Nick?” The senator’s voice was very tentative, and I sensed he was about to offer me sympathy. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you and Ellen were—”

“It’s OK, senator,” I said, interrupting him. I know he meant well, but I did not think I could cope with his heavy-handed sympathy.

There was an awkward pause. A sea-breeze blew through the unglazed window, beyond which pelicans perched on the pilings that held Coffinhead’s boat slips where his small fleet rocked gently under the palm trees. I thought how happy a man could be in a place like this, yet every Eden had its serpent, and the serpent in the Bahamian Eden was the proximity of America’s hunger for drugs.

“Our biggest problem”—the senator tried to restore our attention to his plans for the night—“will be the guards. Warren Smedley of the DEA tells me that he’s certain there will be guards, because it’s likely that there’s several million dollars’ worth of cocaine stored on the island. The guards are probably based in the Colón house, that’s the one with the radar.” The senator leafed through the photographs I had brought from the Maggot’s plane and showed us the house with the small tower.

“I am hopeful,” the senator went on, “that the guards won’t even be aware of our presence. I am also hopeful that we know in which house the twins are staying. I suspect it’s the northernmost house. One of my aides spotted a cassette tape which he recognised as one of Rickie’s favourites. It’s an English group. Something about a dirt-box. Here, you can see the tape box if you look closely.” He found a picture of the northernmost house and laid it on the table. “There.” He pointed at a lounger on the terrace. “If you’ve got good eyes you can probably see it without a magnifying glass.”

Then I stopped listening to the senator and looking for the wretched Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band cassette, because I had seen something else in the photograph. It was something I had missed when I had cursorily leafed through the prints in the aeroplane.

I had found a boat.

Not Dream Baby, but another boat.

The northernmost house, like all the others on Murder Cay, had a private dock that projected into the lagoon. The water at the dock was clearly not deep enough for the larger boats like Dream Baby, but shallow-draught craft could safely be moored to the pilings, and the camera had caught one such boat moored at the northern pier. The angle of the sun and the coincidence of a tangle of palm shadows half obscured the boat, which is why I had missed it on my first casual glance, but now I saw the fantastic flourish that had been painted on the boat’s long bows. That flourish was a shooting star embellished with a cupid’s pair of lips. Starkisser. My blood was suddenly running ice cold. The photograph might mean nothing, yet somehow it meant everything. Starkisser had been at Murder Cay on the very day after Ellen had disappeared, and why, earlier this day, had Bellybutton run from me in such abject terror? Did Bellybutton know that McIllvanney had delivered Ellen to Murder Cay, and was that why he had fled from my anger?

“Nick?” The senator, who had been talking, had evidently asked me a question which had blown straight past me.

I looked up at him. “I’m sorry?”

“I just wondered what chance of success you give us tonight?”

“Success?” I had to laugh. “None at all, senator. Your aides are right, and you’re not just committing political suicide, but real suicide! Your idea doesn’t have a prayer. It doesn’t stand a cat’s chance! You’ve fallen out of your tree, the pair of you. Those bastards on Murder Cay are going to chew you up and spit you out, both of you.”

The Maggot showed no reaction to my pessimism, but the senator looked appalled. “Does that mean you won’t help us, Nick?” For answer I yanked the Russian PKM machine-gun free of the other weapons, unfolded its butt, dropped its bipod, crashed its feed mechanism open and shut, then cocked it. It had been years since I had trained on this particular model, but the familiarity flooded back instantly, and the harsh sounds of the gun’s oiled movements echoed sharply and efficiently in the small room. I pulled the trigger to let the bolt fall on the empty chamber, then I slammed the gun down on the table. I had been showing off; demonstrating my slick competence with guns and letting the senator know that I had been a Marine, and a good one, and that he needed me. “Of course I’m coming,” I said. “I want to kick some ass.”

The senator’s smile of relief was very flattering. He held out his hand. “Thank you, Nick.”

“Way to go!” the Maggot said, and gave me a high five. My father, in one of his rare moments of giving me sober advice, had once warned me against an excessive dependency on emotions. Such a dependency, he claimed, was a luxury only to be indulged in by inadequate actors, children, and clergymen. The rest of us had a duty to think before we jumped and to consider the consequences of our actions. I do not think Sir Tom believed a word of what he was saying—he was probably rehearsing some thoughts from a play he was reading at the time—but, despite the hypocrisy of its histrionic delivery, I had always remembered the advice. I had rarely acted on it, but I had remembered it. Now, staring at the photograph which linked Matthew McIllvanney with Murder Cay, I forgot that good advice. I forgot it because I knew McIllvanney had been stalking Ellen, and suddenly it was all so patently obvious. McIllvanney had kidnapped Ellen and taken her to Murder Cay, there to give her to our enemies, so all I now wanted to do was to take the vicious Russian gun and use it to cry havoc to an island. I did not care what chaos I engendered, I just wanted to hurt the men who had hurt Ellen.

But I should have remembered my father’s hypocritical advice. The senator must have known that three men were not sufficient to challenge the malevolence of the narcotraficantes. Yet the senator was going to Murder Cay.

I should have known that the senator would not lightly put at risk his glorious political future. Yet the senator was going to Murder Cay.

And what part was the Drug Enforcement Administration playing? I did not ask myself that question, yet I knew they had provided the surveillance photographs, and it now seemed they had even read the signature of the radar set on Murder Cay. So what else had they done?

And the Maggot, for all his crudities, had an appetite to enjoy life, yet he too was going to Murder Cay. And where did the Scorpion guns come from, or the PKM, or the flak-jackets? Or the passive night-goggles?

I asked myself none of those questions. Instead I told myself that I was couching a lance for Ellen, just as the senator was charging home for his children, and just as the Maggot was revenging a once dazzling girl who now danced empty-eyed in a Pittsburgh peep-show.

Thus fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

The little Scorpions came with either a ten- or twenty-round magazine, and I helped myself to six of the bigger ones which I taped in pairs, back to back, so that when one magazine was exhausted I would only have to reverse a taped pair to have the gun ready to fire again. I also took handfuls of Coffinhead’s smoke-flares which, while not as good as smoke-grenades, could still generate a useful screen.

The senator refused to carry any weapon, saying he could not provoke violence, while the Maggot loyally chose the American M16 and two American-made Ingram sub-machine-guns. The Maggot and I carried all the guns down to Coffinhead’s dock and stowed them in one of the rigid-raiders. Coffinhead himself was filling the gas tank. He cocked a curious eye at the guns, but knew better than to ask any questions. Instead he wanted to know when the senator was paying him.

“Before we leave tonight,” the Maggot promised, and I wondered just how much this night’s escapade was costing the senator. Certainly Coffinhead was making a fat profit, not just on renting the boat, but he was also charging the senator for the tarpaulin that hid the guns, for the compass I would use to navigate the last few miles to the island, and for the bag of emergency smoke-flares that I had stored under the tarpaulin in the inflatable’s rigid-bottomed hull.

Once the boat was loaded, the Maggot and I wandered to the end of the dock. The light was shading into evening as we stared through the narrow channel that led from Coffinhead’s marina to the open sea. The water was being glossed gold by the setting sun and it was hard to believe that the coming night could bring gunfire.

The Maggot lit a cigarette, then offered me a wry look. “You must be tired, Nick.”

“A bit.” In truth I was utterly knackered.

“I’m glad you’re coming, though.” He spoke softly.

“I’m only doing it for Ellen,” I said bitterly. “Nothing else.”

“Sure, Nick. That’s what I reckoned.” He drew deep on the cigarette, then blew a stream of smoke towards the water.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you’re doing it. You don’t like the senator, and you’d hate his son.”

“I’m doing it for the same reason you’re doing it,” the Maggot said, then he paused and I thought he was not going to elaborate, but suddenly he shrugged. “I was married to Pittsburgh.” He made the confession abruptly.

“Oh, God.” I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sadness of it all. We have just one life to live, only one, and so many people seem to piss the gift away. I thought of the girl’s vivacity, and I tried to imagine such a beauty being wasted in a sleazy stinking pit of a peep-show.

“I guess I’m still married to her,” the Maggot continued quietly. It was hard to read his facial expression behind the tangle of beard, but his voice was full of a most bitter grief. “Her name is Wendy,” he went on, and I sensed that he had not talked about his wife for many years. “Wendy Maggovertski. I met her in a hotel in Cleveland. We’d gone there to play the Browns, and she told me we were going to get our hides whipped. We did too, and she married me ten days later. Just like that. I thought the sun and stars shone out of that lady, Nick.”

I stared at him, wishing that Ellen had seen this vulnerable side of such an apparently invulnerable man. “I’m sorry, John,” I said inadequately.

“She could make people laugh, know what I mean?” He stared blindly across the lovely stretch of water. “When she walked into a room it was like an extra bulb had been switched on. Now she gives blow jobs to buy herself cocaine.”

“Oh, God,” I said, so very inadequately.

“It was a fag dancer who trained at her health club who gave her the first cocaine. He gave me some too. I thought it was just another piece of being alive, a piece of fun, but it never touched me like it touched Wendy. She suddenly wanted nothing but cocaine, then more cocaine, and when I stopped giving her the money for it she left me to make her own money.” He sucked on the cigarette again, so deeply that its tip glowed a hard, brilliant red. “I killed the little bastard.”

“Who?”

“The fag dancer.” There were tears in the Maggot’s eyes. “No one knows, of course, and I’d deny it if you told anyone, but I broke the pansy faggot’s neck.” The spleen in the Maggot’s voice was of a terrible intensity. “It didn’t help. It didn’t bring Wendy back. She’ll never come back now. She’ll just die. But tonight I’ll take some more revenge on the bastards who took her away from me. Fuck ’em, Nick! Let’s go get ’em!” He howled the challenge into the darkling lagoon, then thumped one huge fist into a massive palm, and I thought this was how he must have been just before a football game, hyped up and emotional, except that tonight we were playing with guns, and any defeat would be for ever.

Because tonight we would both be fools for love.

At Murder Cay.