The Deceiver (57 page)

The official posters, prepared by the local printer under the auspices of Inspector Jones and paid for with Government House money, offered a reward of one thousand U.S. dollars to anyone reporting seeing someone in the alley behind the wall of the Government House garden at approximately five
P.M.
on Tuesday evening.

A thousand American dollars was a stunning sum for the ordinary people of Port Plaisance. It should bring someone out—someone who had seen something, or some person. And in Sunshine everybody knew everybody.

At the airstrip Hannah saw to the loading of the body, accompanied by Bannister and the four men of the Bahamian forensic team. Bannister would see that the entire volume of their scrapings and samples went on the evening flight to London, to be collected at dawn by a squad car from Scotland Yard and taken to the Home Office’s forensic laboratory in Lambeth. He had few hopes it would turn up much; it was the second bullet he wanted, and Dr. West would retrieve that for him when he opened the body in Nassau that night.

Because he was at the airstrip, Hannah missed the Johnson rally in Parliament Square that afternoon. So did the press corps, who having covered the start of the rally, saw the police convoy driving past and followed it out to the airstrip.

McCready did not miss the rally. He was on the verandah of the Quarter Deck Hotel at the time.

A desultory crowd of about two hundred had gathered to hear their philanthropic benefactor address them. McCready noticed half a dozen men in brightly colored beach shirts and dark glasses mingling with the crowd, handing out small pieces of paper and flags on sticks. The flags were in the candidate’s blue and white colors. The pieces of paper were dollar bills.

At precisely ten past three, a white Ford Fairlane—certainly the biggest car on the island—swept into the square and up to the speaking platform. Mr. Marcus Johnson leaped out and ascended the steps. He held up his hands in a boxer’s victory salute. Led by the bright-shirted ones, there was a round of applause. Some flags waved. In minutes, Marcus Johnson was into his speech.

“And I promise you, my friends, and you are
all
my friends”—the dentifrice smile flashed from the bronze face—“when we are finally free, a wave of prosperity will come to these islands. There will be work—in the hotels, in the new marina, in the bars and cafés, in the new industries for the processing of fish from the sea for sale on the mainland—from all these things, prosperity will flow. And it will flow into
your
pockets, my friends, not into the hands of men far away in London—”

He was using a bullhorn to reach everyone in the square. The interruption came from a man who did not need a bullhorn. The deep bass came from the other side of the square, but it came over the sound of the politician.

“Johnson!” roared Walter Drake. “We do not want you here! Why don’t you go back where you came from, and take your Yardies with you?”

Suddenly there was silence. The stunned crowd waited for the sky to fall. No one had ever interrupted Marcus Johnson before.

But the sky did not fall. Without a word, Johnson put down his megaphone and jumped into his car. At a word from him, it sped off, pursued by a second car containing his group of helpers.

“Who is that?” McCready asked the waiter on the verandah.

“Reverend Drake, sir,” said the waiter. He seemed awestruck, even rather frightened.

McCready was thoughtful. He had heard a voice used like that somewhere before, and he tried to recall where. Then he placed it; during his National Service thirty years earlier, at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. On a parade ground. He went to his room and made a secure call to Miami.

Reverend Walter Drake took his beating in silence. There were four of them, and they came for him that night as he left his church and walked home. They used baseball bats and their feet. They hit hard, whipping the wooden staves down onto the man on the ground. When they were finished, they left him. He might have been dead. They would not have minded. But he was not.

Half an hour later, he recovered consciousness and crawled to the nearest house. The frightened family called Dr. Caractacus Jones, who had the preacher brought to his clinic on a handcart, and he spent the rest of the night patching him up.

Desmond Hannah had a call that evening during supper. He had to leave the hotel to go to Government House to take it. It was from Dr. West in Nassau.

“Look, I know they’re supposed to be preserved,” said the forensic pathologist, “but this one’s like a block of wood. Frozen solid.”

“The locals did the best they could,” said Hannah.

“So will I,” said the doctor. “But it’s going to take me twenty-four hours to thaw the bugger out.”

“As fast as you can, please,” said Hannah. “I need that damned bullet.”

DETECTIVE CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT HANNAH
elected to interview Mr. Horatio Livingstone first. He rang him at his house in Shantytown just after sunrise, and the politician came to the phone after several minutes. Yes, he would be delighted to receive the man from Scotland Yard within the hour.

Oscar drove the Jaguar with Detective Parker beside him. Hannah was in the back with Dillon of the Foreign Office. Their route did not pass through the center of Port Plaisance, for Shantytown lay three miles down the coast, on the same side of the capital as Government House.

“Any progress with your inquiries, Mr. Hannah, or is that an unprofessional question?” Dillon asked politely.

Hannah never liked to discuss the state of an inquiry with anyone other than colleagues. Still, this Dillon was apparently from the Foreign Office.

“The Governor was killed by a single shot through the heart from a heavy-caliber handgun,” he said. “There seem to have been two shots fired. One missed and hit the wall behind him. I recovered the slug and sent it to London.”

“Badly distorted?” asked Dillon.

“I’m afraid so. The other bullet seems to be lodged in the body. I’ll know more when I get the results of the postmortem from Nassau tonight.”

“And the killer?”

“Seems to have entered from the gate in the garden wall, which was torn off its locks. Fired from about a ten-foot range, then withdrew. Apparently.”

“Apparently?”

Hannah explained his idea that the torn-off lock might have been a ruse to distract attention from an assassin coming from the house itself.

Dillon was most admiring. “I’d never have thought of that,” he said.

The car entered Shantytown. As its name implied, it was a village of clustered homes made of wooden planks and galvanized sheet roofing, with some five thousand inhabitants.

Small shops selling an array of vegetables and T-shirts jostled for space with the houses and the bars. It was clearly Livingstone territory—no posters for Marcus Johnson were to be seen here, but those for Livingstone were everywhere.

In the center of Shantytown, reached by its widest (and only) street, stood a single walled compound. The walls were of coral blocks, and a single gate wide enough for a car admitted entry. Beyond the walls could be seen the roof of the house, the only two-story edifice in Shantytown. Hannah knew of the rumor that Mr. Livingstone owned many of the bars in the village and took tribute from those he did not.

The Jaguar halted at the gate, and Stone sounded the horn. All down the street, Barclayans were standing to stare at the gleaming limousine with the pennant fluttering from the front right wing. The Governor’s car had never been into Shantytown before.

A small window in the gate opened, an eye surveyed the car, and the gate swung open. The Jaguar rolled forward into a dusty yard and stopped by the verandah to the house. Two men were in the yard, one by the gate and one waiting at the verandah. Both wore identical pale-gray safari suits. A third man in similar dress stood at an upstairs window. As the car halted, he withdrew.

Hannah, Parker, and Dillon were shown into the principal sitting room, cheaply but functionally furnished, and a few seconds later Horatio Livingstone appeared. He was a large fat man, and his jowly face was wreathed in smiles. He exuded bonhomie.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, what an honor. Please, be seated.”

He gestured for coffee and seated himself in a large chair. His small, button eyes flickered from one to the other of the three white faces before him. Two other men entered the room and seated themselves behind the candidate. Livingstone gestured to them.

“Two of my associates—Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown.”

The two inclined their heads but said nothing.

“Now, Mr. Hannah, what can I do for you?”

“You will know, sir, that I am here to investigate the murder four days ago of Governor Sir Marston Moberley.”

Livingstone’s smile dropped, and he shook his head. “A dreadful thing,” he rumbled. “We were all deeply shocked. A fine, fine man.”

“I’m afraid I have to ask you what you were doing and where you were at five
P.M.
on Tuesday evening.”

“I was here, Mr. Hannah, here among my friends, who will vouch for me. I was working on a speech to the Smallholders Association for the next day.”

“And your associates, they were here?
All
here?”

“Every one of them. It was close to sundown. We had all retired for the day. Here, inside the compound.”

“Your associates—are they Barclayans?” asked Dillon.

Hannah shot him a glance of irritation; the man had promised to say nothing.

Livingstone beamed. “Ah, no, I fear not. I and my fellow Barclayans have so little experience of organizing an election campaign, I felt I needed some administrative help.” He gestured and beamed again, a reasonable man among reasonable men. “The preparing of speeches, posters, pamphlets, public meetings. My associates are from the Bahamas. You wish to see their passports? They were all examined when they arrived.”

Hannah waved the necessity away. Behind Mr. Livingstone, Mr. Brown had lit a large cigar.

“Would you have any idea, Mr. Livingstone, who might have killed the Governor?” asked Hannah.

The fat man’s smile dropped again, and he adopted a mien of great seriousness. “Mr. Hannah, the Governor was helping us all on the road to our independence, to our final freedom from the British Empire. According to the policy of London. There was not the slightest motive for me or any of my associates to wish to harm him.”

Behind him, Mr. Brown held his cigar to one side, and with the much-elongated nail of his little finger, he flicked an inch of ash from the tip so that the ash fell to the floor. The burning ember never touched the flesh of his finger.

McCready knew he had seen that gesture somewhere before. “Will you be holding any public meetings today?” he asked quietly.

Livingstone’s small black eyes switched toward him. “Yes, at twelve I am addressing my brothers and sisters of the fishing community on the docks,” he said.

“Yesterday there was a disturbance when Mr. Johnson addressed people in Parliament Square,” said Dillon.

Livingstone showed no pleasure in the ruining of his rival’s meeting. “A single heckler,” he snapped.

“Heckling is also part of the democratic process,” observed Dillon.

Livingstone stared at him, expressionless for once. Behind the creased jowls, he was angry. McCready realized he had seen that expression before; on the face of Idi Amin of Uganda, when he had been contradicted.

Hannah glowered at Dillon and rose. “I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Livingstone,” he said.

The politician, exuding jollity again, escorted them to the door. Two more gray safari suits saw them off the premises. Different men. That made seven of them, including the one at the upstairs window. All were pure Negroid except Mr. Brown, who was much paler, a quadroon, the only one who dared smoke without asking, the man in charge of the other six.

“I would be grateful,” said Hannah in the car, “if you would leave the questioning to me.”

“Sorry,” said Dillon. “Strange man, didn’t you think? I wonder where he spent the years between leaving here as a teenager and returning six months ago.”

“No idea,” said Hannah. It was only later, in London, when he was thinking things over, that he would wonder at Dillon’s remark about Livingstone leaving Sunshine as a teenager. It was Missy Coltrane who had told him, Desmond Hannah, that. Dillon had not been there.

At half-past nine, they arrived at the gates of Marcus Johnson’s estate on the northern flank of Sawbones Hill.

Johnson’s style was completely different from Livingstone’s. He was clearly a wealthy man. An assistant in psychedelic beach shirt and black glasses opened the wrought-iron gates to the drive and let the Jaguar proceed up the raked gravel to the front door. Two gardeners were at work, tending the lawns, flower beds, and earthenware jars of bright geraniums.

The house was a spacious, two-story building with a roof of green glazed tiles, every block and stick of it imported. The three Englishmen alighted in front of a pillared Colonial portico and were led inside. They followed their guide, a second brightly shirted “assistant,” across a reception area floored in marble slabs and furnished with European and Spanish-American antiques. Rugs from Bokhara and Kashan splashed the cream marble.

Marcus Johnson received them on a marble verandah scattered with white rattan chairs. Below the verandah lay the garden and tonsured lawns running to an eight-foot wall. Beyond the wall lay the coast road, which was one thing Johnson could not buy to give himself direct access to the sea. On the waters of Teach Bay, beyond the wall, was the stone jetty he had built. Next to it bobbed a Riva 40 speedboat. With long-range tanks, the Riva could reach the Bahamas at speed.

Where Horatio Livingstone was fat and creased, Marcus Johnson was slim and elegant. He wore an impeccable cream silk suit. The cast of his features indicated he was at least half white, and McCready wondered if he had known his father. Probably not. He had come from poverty in the Barclays as a boy, been brought up by his mother in a shack. His dark brown hair had been artificially straightened, from curly to wavy. Four heavy gold rings adorned his hands, and the teeth in the flashing smile were perfect.