False Nine

16

The RPF police station in St John’s Newgate Street had seen better days but none of them I’ll warrant since the British had left. A yellowing concrete three-storey building with iron bars on the lower windows and a threadbare flag on a crooked white pole in the front courtyard, it looked more like a cheap motel with hot and cold running cockroaches. Close by was the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda but the police station itself might easily have been one of the museum’s more interesting exhibits. Everything in there seemed to move at an invisible pace, as if displayed in some dusty glass case. Just around the corner to the east was St John’s Cathedral and a girls’ high school and a few blocks to the west was the island’s deepwater harbour where cruise ships as big as office blocks from places as far afield as Mallorca and Norway were now docked. The girls’ school was on its break or its lunch hour. I knew that because through the open windows of the police station you could have heard the girls’ screaming and shouting back in Palma and Oslo.

I’d seen the police inspector handling Jérôme’s disappearance before — on Google Images. His name was Winchester White. There was a photograph of the island’s top-ranking security officials in a meeting about something and, in the picture, it looked a lot like he was asleep. Maybe it was just an unfortunate photograph but, speaking to Inspector White, I quickly gained the impression that he was looking forward to closing his eyes again the minute I’d left his office — not least because there was a large tin of Ovaltine behind his woolly head. He wore a neatly pressed khaki shirt and a pair of matching trousers. His dark, peaked cap lay on the desk in front of him as if he’d been begging for change. Except for the fact that Winchester White was black he looked like the district commissioner from an old Tarzan movie. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d had an officer’s swagger stick.

‘It’s not that my employers doubt the efficiency of the RPF,’ I said. ‘Not for a minute. It’s just that they feel they have to be seen to be doing something. In fact, the insurance company is insisting on it. I’m sure you understand how that works. Jérôme Dumas is extremely valuable to both Paris Saint-Germain and FC Barcelona. Not to mention a whole host of companies with whom Mr Dumas has important commercial arrangements to do with his image rights. My intention here is not to step on the RPF’s toes but, perhaps, to provide a different perspective on exactly what might have become of him. Please understand, I’m here to assist, not to obstruct.’

This sounded good; shit, it might even have been true. There are times when I even manage to convince myself. The UN Secretary General himself couldn’t have sounded more diplomatic.

‘It’s not the RPF,’ he said dully. ‘It’s the RPFAB.’

‘Right. Thank you.’

‘You’re forgetting Barbuda.’

‘No, I wasn’t. I was just giving you some shorthand. So that I didn’t waste your valuable time. But my mistake. I can see now that wasn’t really important.’

‘It’s important if you is from Barbuda,’ he said. ‘Like I am.’

There was a longish silence while the police inspector tasted the inside of his mouth and then scratched an almost invisible pimp moustache before a short coughing fit had him hawking something up, and going to the window to spit. As he moved I caught the strong smell of sweat on his body, like the sharply sour odour of a waxed jacket, and I began for the first time to consider something of the everyday, harsh reality of his life as a policeman on a little tropical island. Against the bright sun he almost disappeared for a moment, like a character on Star Trek, before he strolled back to his swivel chair and sat down again amidst a cacophony of creaking wood, imitation leather and professional pride.

‘Go ahead and ask your questions,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you what I can tell you.’

‘Are there any leads you’re working on?’

‘Not as such, no.’

‘Have any bodies been found on the island that have yet to be identified?’

‘I don’t think he dead, if that’s what you mean, Mr Manson. Antigua’s a very safe place. Safer than London or Paris.’

‘Still, there are murders here, aren’t there? DJ Jewel Movement, for example.’

‘Murder is rare on the island. We caught the man who killed DJ JM more or less immediately. The whole thing be cut and dried.’

‘Yes, yes of course. But actually I was thinking of suicide.’

‘Don’t do it, Mr Manson.’ He grinned. ‘You’re still a young man with your whole life in front of you.’

I smiled back at him. ‘He was prone to depression, you see.’

‘What the hell he have to be depressed about when he can afford to stay at Jumby Bay?’

‘That’s a good question. But of course that’s not how depression works. His footballing career in Paris hadn’t gone so well. Which is why he was on his way to play for Barcelona. He’d broken up with his girlfriend. And he was taking antidepressants. So, maybe he heard about a favourite suicide spot on the island. You know? A cliff. A beach with a rip tide.’

‘You swim far enough you’ll meet a shark for sure and then we might never find him. Only, the desk clerk at the hotel said he was in a good mood when he left. Even after he’d paid the bill, which would have depressed me. ‘Sides, why go to the airport if you thinking of doing yourself in? It don’t make no sense that he should do himself in if he be about to check in and go home. I don’t see him packing all his bags and then going for a swim. Also, if you be going to do yourself in you generally leave something behind. Maybe not a note. But possibly your mobile phone. The rest of your stuff. But it ain’t just Mr Dumas who is gone, it be all his stuff too.’

‘Good point.’

The inspector sighed and waited for me to ask another question. It was beginning to seem as if in spite of my pretty speech he wasn’t about to volunteer any information. And I didn’t need to find a horse’s head at the bottom of my bed in the morning to get the message: me and my Inspector Poirot bullshit really weren’t welcome here.

‘Are you working on any theories as to what might have happened to Mr Dumas?’ I asked.

‘Theories? Shit, yeah. Got plenty of those.’

With each reluctant answer I was also aware of the dust on the floor, the chewed pencil on the desk, the brimful ashtray, the open door which, alongside the ceiling fan, was the room’s only air conditioning, and the many advantages of my own life compared with his. As he’d suggested, the bill I was very likely going to generate at the Jumby Bay Hotel would probably be as much as a cop like him made in a year. Sometimes you had to wonder how it was that more tourists in a place like that didn’t come to a sticky end. Quite what the inspector would have made of Jérôme’s more obviously luxury lifestyle — which was there for all to see in the latest edition of GQ that was on the coffee table in my suite — I could only imagine.

I waited for a long moment and then asked: ‘Might I ask what these are?’

‘I personally am of the strong belief that the man was snatched from VC Bird Airport minutes after he arrived there at the end of his holiday. That someone figure he be a man with lots of money. Like all of you folks at Jumby Bay. But unlike most of the folk who go holidaying in Jumby we happen to know he went to some bad boy clubs in St John’s that is frequented by drug traffickers. For that reason we think he came up on their radar as someone who might be worth kidnapping. And that they persuaded some girl to entice him away from there. I am of the opinion that he probably be held somewhere in the centre of the island. Signal Hill, perhaps. That they be looking to deliver a ransom request when they think it a bit safer than now. And that they be keeping their heads down for fear that we be catchin’ them. Fact is, I got my men searching the whole island looking for this young fellow and I am confident that we find him any day now. It’s just a question of time, see? Everything on Antigua take a bit longer than it does back in England. But rest assured, sir, that if he’s on the island, we will find him.’

I nodded. ‘What clubs are they — the bad boy clubs you were talking about?’

‘I wouldn’t recommend you go to any, Mr Manson. We got enough trouble as it is with one missing tourist.’

‘Nevertheless, I would like to know the names. For my report, you understand.’

He nodded. ‘All right. There’s a place off the Old Road on Signal Hill that’s called The Rum Runner. They smoke a lot of weed, get drunk on canita, run their whores, watch football and porn on TV. The satnav on an Enterprise Car that Mr Dumas hired showed he’d been there. He was also near a brothel in Freetown that’s widely known as the Treehouse.’

‘And have you questioned the people there?’

‘Questioned, sure. Didn’t get no answers. Didn’t expect to get any, neither. RPFAB ain’t welcome in they places. People tend to clam up when we start asking questions.’

‘Perhaps if we were to offer a reward. Say a thousand dollars.’

‘Here’s the thing about rewards, Mr Manson. As I told your employers in Paris they’re not a substitute for good old-fashioned police work. They waste my time. A high income on the island is thirteen thousand US dollars. People say anything in search of a reward which is as much as what you’re suggesting. For a thousand dollars I myself would tell you I saw the man abducted by aliens. Ya see what I is saying? I just don’t have the men to separate the time-wasters from what might be a genuine lead. So keep your money quiet, please.’

I tried another tack. ‘You’ve considered the possibility that he’s no longer on the island, of course.’

‘Sure. We’ve been checking out private airfields, boatyards all over Antigua. Believe me, sir, we leaving no stone unturned in the search for this man. I call you as soon as I find something. My advice to you is go back to your comfortable hotel and sit by the telephone.’

I wasn’t going to do that, although he was right, of course. I was merely playing at what he was doing professionally, 365 days a year. He did it because he had to do it, in order to make a living. He knew it and I now I knew it; and, as I was leaving his office, I reflected how polite he’d been. I might easily have laughed if Winchester White had turned up in my office posing as a football manager, and yet here he was, listening patiently while I asked my very obvious questions. I felt appalled at myself and decided then and there that this was going to be the last time I was ever persuaded to play the joke role of amateur detective.

I thanked him for his time and walked out the door. In a little waiting area outside his office was an attractive, well-dressed woman in her early thirties who, seeing Winchester White, stood up, politely. A black Burberry briefcase sat on the floor by her polished black shoes. In spite of the heat her white blouse looked as clean and fresh as the tablecloth I’d had on my table at breakfast time.

As she smiled at me I realised she must have heard every word I’d said to the police inspector.

Not that there are many secrets on an island the size of Antigua.