The Turtle Run (15 page)

Joe's letter was a welcome contrast, his handwriting a little chaotic but energy leaping from the page. He asked questions about the climate, the wildlife, and did boys really play cricket in the street? (Becky had hardly been out enough to answer that one). Had the pillock tried it on with her? (This was accompanied by a rather rude diagram of where to hit him if he did). Had she learnt anything about their father? (That made Becky feel guilty for she had barely thought about tracing him). There was also evidence Joe had been doing some research of his own though clearly he favoured the
Horrible Histories
approach: he wrote that the Duke of Monmouth's execution was so botched it took multiple axe chops to finish him off and in the end the executioner had to be whisked away before he was torn to shreds by the furious public. Joe finished the letter with a drawing of a tombstone with the words ‘Thomas Gehalgod lives' scrawled over it.

Becky smiled. The way things were going she would be better off posting her questions to Joe to have him trawl the internet and post back his findings.

When Clara went up for her afternoon nap, Becky went through the
History of Barbados
again to see if there was any mention of the Darnley plantation but the book didn't go into that level of detail. If she could just get online to check out the Deaths and Marriages websites she had been given at the library she would be in with a chance of finding something about Sarah Thomas. Maybe not marriage – if Sarah counted as a Monmouth rebel she wouldn't have been allowed to marry – but she would have died at some point.

It occurred to Becky that Cook had been in the household a long time and there was the slimmest of chances some folklore had been passed down by the people who worked for the Darnleys. She decided to ask Cook that evening when Clara was hosting her usual bridge session.

Becky noticed that Cook sounded a little breathless when she dished out their stew. After eating Becky helped Clara get the dining room ready for the bridge party then carried the dishes out to the kitchen. Cook's breathing sounded even more laboured than before.

‘I'll clear up,' said Becky, putting the plates in the sink and running the water.

Cook nodded gratefully and sat down, leaning heavily on the kitchen table. After a moment or two she said, ‘I think I need one of my pills.'

‘Tell me where they are,' said Becky. ‘I'll get them.'

‘Thank you. On the table in my room.'

Becky stopped washing up and hurried to Cook's room. She knew it was at the back of the house but had never been down this corridor behind the main reception rooms before. She passed a downstairs toilet and a locked and bolted door which must lead to Matthew's office and opened the door at the farthest end. Stifling heat hit her and she cursed Matthew for giving Cook a windowless room but, when she switched on the light, she could see there was a large window, tightly shut. She found a small pill bottle on a table by the single bed and brought it back to the kitchen.

‘It's too hot in your room,' said Becky. ‘Shall I go back and open the window?'

‘No thanks,' said Cook.'

‘Ah,' said Becky, getting a glass of water for her. ‘I forgot that a duppy can get through the smallest crack. So what would it do if it got in?'

Cook shrugged. ‘Mess up tings. Trow tings. Mek a fire.'

‘Well, your room is duppy-free. It's the neatest room I've ever seen.'

Cook made a face and swallowed a tablet. ‘Because I keep the window closed.'

Becky resumed the washing up but did not feel she could raise the subject of Sarah Thomas now. She was pleased to hear Cook's breathing gradually get steadier and before long the old lady heaved herself up and headed to bed.

Becky finished clearing up and headed out on the veranda. Even a few minutes in Cook's room had made her feel in need of air and she could not imagine how Cook got any sleep. Maybe that was why she dozed so much in the kitchen during the day.

Becky sat down and looked out into the night. The laughter of Clara's guests sounded far away, drowned by the whistling laments of the little beasts in the foliage below. A breeze picked up and woke the giant bamboo so that its usual gentle creaking turned into a more ominous sound – like that of an army of men cutting through a forest to approach the house. Another strange instrument joined the timeless orchestra that surrounded her – a whining, buzzing sound that filled the darkness and swelled until the sky seemed filled with malevolent angels. Becky had a sudden vision of transparent floating upper torsos – duppies – following the slave ships from Africa to the West Indies and America. She shook her head to dispel it but knew the sound wasn't just in her mind when the conversation in the dining room died away and the bridge ladies ventured out on to the veranda.

‘What on earth is it?' asked the Artificial Woman, who wouldn't have been able to raise her eyebrows any higher without first rubbing off the old ones and drawing a new pair.

‘It's horrible,' said another, laying a hand over her heart. To Becky she said, ‘How can you bear to be out here alone?'

‘I'd like to know what it is,' said Becky who also found the sound deeply unsettling, the more so because she couldn't identify it.

The lady who had put her hand over her heart put her fingers in her ears and hurried back inside.

‘It's a singing angel,' said Renee. ‘At least I think it's a Singing Angel. Normally there's just one but this sounds like an army of the beasts. I've never heard so many.'

‘It's a Mad Bull,' said another. ‘I should know. I had to ban my grandson from making them.'

That made Becky feel better. If the noise was caused by something a child could make, it could not be anything dangerous.

‘No wonder some people want them banned at night,' said Clara.

‘I've never heard it this bad before,' said Renee. ‘I hope the wind dies down otherwise you won't get any sleep tonight.'

The noise was such that it brought the curtain down on the act of bridge and soon the ladies were turning out of the yard and pointing their cars towards their own more tranquil neighbourhoods. Clara went to bed, muttering distractedly, and Becky opted to go up too. She lay on top of her sheets, searching for sleep, but it would not come. She tried closing the window but the heat was soon suffocating. Her room had a fan on the table but she tended to avoid using it, as the waves of air interfered with her sleep. She tried one more time with the window open and the buzzing noise increased triumphantly. Matthew came home and she heard the rat-a-tat of the bolts locking out whatever villains lurked outside but the bolts were powerless against this formless intruder. She wondered what Matthew thought about it.

Chapter Nine

Becky tried to sleep with pillows wedged round her ears but at six o'clock she gave up the futile struggle and got up. The buzzing was probably less intense than it had been the previous night but its very unceasing monotony was distressing. She realised she had assumed daybreak would herald a return to normality. No such luck.

She found Matthew on the veranda – like her still in pyjamas – leaning over the balustrade. His face looked worn with sleeplessness.

‘When did this start?' he said curtly. There was no point expecting a ‘good morning' out of him as this morning clearly wasn't.

‘About ten o'clock last night. Where's it coming from?'

‘Hopefully on our land. Can you get dressed? Give me a hand?'

‘OK,' she said. ‘See you back here.'

Ten minutes later they were both back on the veranda, Becky wearing shorts and a T-shirt and Matthew for once wearing a shirt with his black shorts. He was also armed, rather alarmingly, with a machete and a small knife.

‘Are we going to need a lawyer for this?' asked Becky.

To her surprise he laughed. ‘If they're on someone else's land then we will be trespassing and may have to kill a couple of pit bull terriers before we finish off the owner – then we might need a lawyer.'

‘Oh.' She hoped he was joking.

‘But as I said hopefully they're on our side of the wall.'

Cook came out on the veranda and regarded Matthew and his weapons impassively. She said, ‘I'm going to church later.'

‘Are you saying that because you want a lift or telling me because you're going to pray for my soul?' asked Matthew.

A half-smile played on the old lady's face. ‘Both,' she said.

‘Maybe you could slip in a prayer for an end to this assault on our ears.'

‘Maybe I will,' said Cook and went back inside.

Matthew shook his head with something like admiration then turned to Becky. ‘You look terrible.'

She certainly felt it. Even Matthew with his darker-toned skin had noticeable circles under his eyes. ‘So do you.'

‘Cook looks better than both of us. I don't know how she managed to sleep.'

Becky knew it was because Cook kept her window shut but said nothing. She followed him out of the yard towards the area of rough ground at the end of the drive. To the left of the mahogany treeline was the grassy area she had explored with Zena a couple of days before, whereas the land they were heading for was banded by casuarina trees. The noise of the wind playing through their needles was usually a comforting sound but today it was quite usurped by the duppies. Matthew strode ahead, not talking, though he would have had to shout to be heard above the furious buzzing. The occasional swipe of his machete to knock away a recalcitrant clump of tall razor-sharp grass alongside the drive revealed more about his mood than any conversation might.

However one person seemed unaffected by the racket. Beneath the branches of a casuarina tree was a figure, fully stretched out with a floppy fedora over his face.

‘Pitcher,' said Matthew, with weary resignation. ‘Worn out by gardening as usual.'

As they drew nearer Becky could see Pitcher's chalk-white arms resting on his stomach. His trousers were so torn they were more like tasselled shorts and his shirt was all but bleached of colour.

‘Looks like he could do with some new clothes,' she said.

‘I can't tell him what to spend his money on.'

‘It was an observation,' said Becky. ‘No need to take it as criticism.'

Matthew grunted. Despite the fact they were standing over him, Pitcher seemed oblivious of their presence.

‘I take it he is just sleeping?' said Becky, watching Pitcher's chest to check he was breathing.

‘Let's hope so.' Matthew carried on walking.

They came in sight of what Becky assumed was an old plantation wall and – presumably – the boundary of Matthew's land. He stopped now, seeming to survey the area as if he expected to find something right in front of them. Becky couldn't see anything obvious. Beyond the low wall was yet more scrub and another wall could be seen ahead, perpendicular to them, roughly threading its way over the land beyond.

Something about that wall seemed out of place here and yet looked familiar to Becky. The buzzing noise seemed to reach a crescendo as she walked nearer to the boundary to look over. For a moment she remembered being with a very young Joe on holiday somewhere in the south west of England, maybe Devon or Dorset. Her father was pointing out a wall to them and explaining that it took real skill to build such a structure without cement; one that could stand for hundreds of years. There was no mistaking it – she was looking at a drystone wall.

Becky would have liked to ask Matthew what use they had in Barbados but he was staring at the sky.

‘Look at that,' he shouted. ‘There must be at least twenty.'

Becky followed his gaze to see several blobs floating above them, no more distinguishable than skylarks on a summer's day in Britain.

‘Can you see the strings?' he asked.

She peered more closely and realised what the objects were. ‘Oh yes. Now I can.' There were twenty kites tied to stakes in the ground – all screaming with fury at being tethered. She had actually passed between two of them without realising.

‘I've never heard kites make this kind of noise,' she shouted. ‘But at least they're on your side of the wall.'

‘Yes,' said Matthew, grumpily. ‘Someone trying to make a point.' He walked forward and touched the string attached to the nearest stake as if to test the tension. ‘They were lucky with the weather.'

‘They? You think someone did this deliberately?' It was a stupid question – of course the kites could not have tethered themselves – but she was sleep deprived.

Matthew flung the machete and knife down and started pulling hand over hand to rein in the first kite. As the soaring beast drew nearer, Becky recognised a conventional old-fashioned coffin shape and was surprised to see it was just a shop-bought kite. It lost its nerve fifty or so yards from the ground, its serpentine wanderings abruptly terminating with a slow decline to the grass. Matthew pointed to a flap of plastic, which looked like it had been cut from a normal throwaway plastic bag, stuck fast to the top of the kite.

‘That's the Mad Bull?' shouted Becky.

Matthew looked surprised. ‘You've heard about them? I made my own when I was young. You had to make them as loud as possible. But that's the sort of thing that irritating little boys do.'

‘So this was probably just boys messing around?'

‘Childish men would be nearer the truth.' He picked up the machete and the knife. ‘Now, what to do? I would like to cut the strings; it would certainly save time.' He looked at her. ‘What would you do?'

Becky felt like she was being tested but either way her answer would have been the same. ‘I think we should pull them down. I don't know what the consequences would be if we just cut them loose.'

He nodded, as if she had confirmed his own thoughts. Matthew put down the knife and machete again and they worked their way along the stakes. Pulling the kites down was surprisingly hard work and Becky appreciated the same breeze that had kept the beasts up in the air overnight; each one had a fold of plastic bag glued to it – which looked quite incongruous with the otherwise professionally made kites.