by Dick Francis
I was being careful to stand on her tiles so as not to dirty her rugs. “My feet are O.K.... when did the helicopter find Kris?”
Michael, frowning, answered vaguely, “Not yesterday ... the day before, I think.” He looked for confirmation to Amy, who indecisively nodded.
“And, er ...” I asked without pressure, “where is he now?”
Amy answered, but after thought. “He went home to England. He said he was due back at work. Now, do put better clothes on. All your things are still in the room you used here.”
I gave in to her housekeeperly urging and in deep luxury showered, got rid of the stubbly beginnings of beard, and dressed in clean soap-smelling shirt, cotton trousers and flip-flop sandals. Amy greeted the result with hands held high and multiple compliments, and Michael said he had lit the barbecue fire and was baking potatoes to go with the steak.
It wasn’t until after the food that they asked where I’d been and how I’d survived, and they showed shock and interest in suitable intensities at my account.
I explained that Kris in the last minute of control before the aircraft crashed into the sea had said that he was going to try to reach Trox Island, and that by some miracle the currents had actually swept me back there, where we had landed earlier on some errand for Robin.
“What errand?” Michael asked intently.
I said I didn’t know. I said I didn’t think Kris was clear about it either. I looked blankly puzzled. I told them that most extraordinarily I’d been brought back to Cayman in some sort of semi-military aircraft with a crew wearing radiation suits and carrying assault weapons. The crew hadn’t spoken to me or done anything I understood. It was all very odd. but anyway they’d blindfolded me, tied my wrists with bandages from—I supposed—the first-aid box every aircraft had to carry, and when they’d landed here on Cayman, they let me go. A Jamaican man who was passing had kindly untied me and driven me to the Fords’ door.
“Good heavens!” Amy exclaimed. “How dreadful!”
“Are you going to the police?” Michael asked, frowning.
“I shouldn’t think so,” I confessed. “I don’t want to get that crew into trouble. I don’t think they were pleased I was on the island, but, even if they tied me up to do it, they did bring me back here safely. Whatever they were doing there, it’s none of my business.”
Michael and Amy smiled broadly with evident approval. I didn’t tell them I knew for a certainty that three of my captors /rescuers had been Michael and Amy themselves, and Robin Darcy too.
I didn’t thank them for working out how to get me back to civilization without my seeing their faces. though I was pleased they had done it.
I didn’t say that I’d had ages to memorize the aircraft’s registration letters and numbers—which began with N, and were therefore American.
I certainly didn’t tell them I’d opened their safe and had had little else to do for lengthy days but try to decipher the messages of the foreign-language letters.
Amy crossed the sitting room, raised her arms again, stood on tiptoes and kissed my cheek. She smelled sweetly of the same scent as one of the crew, the slender guard who had had to stretch up high to tie the blindfold tightly round my head.
Robin, rotund round Robin, had had to wear his just visible heavily framed eyeglasses inside his silver helmet to see what he was doing, and also, in the sort of unconscious mannerism everyone has, he had stood with his wrists crossed below his stomach, as he had done both in Newmarket and on his own terrace when the police had come to deal with his “intruder.”
Amy, short and slender, and Michael, broad-shouldered and bow-legged, had completed and revealed the trio’s back view unmistakably as they walked away from the aircraft towards the thick-walled huts.
Identifying them, in view of their intention not to be known, had sent the severe flutter of fear through my gut that had kept me silent, passive and concentrated in front of their guns.
With excuses of real tiredness I put an early end to the smiling artificiality of the evening; and, to my hosts’ perceptible relief, went to bed.
Odin, as I discovered heavy-eyed from the television after another night of bad dreams, had changed direction yet again since Kris and I had left Trox Island to search for the eye.
Michael having waved me permissively towards his telephone, I reached my meteorological colleague in Miami and shocked him into believing that Lazarus had nothing on P. Stuart.
When I asked if he could spare the time to have me call on him in his office on my way back to England he said with enthusiasm that he’d leave word at the front desk; and later that day, after the friendliest of farewells from Michael and Amy, who drove me to Owen Roberts airport in their orange truck. I landed in Miami, sought out my so far unseen good telephone pal, and was shown into the tracking heart of the hurricane center.
My pal, Will. turned out to be about twenty-five, tall, thin, dedicated and full of welcome.
“You’re in here only because you’re you.” he said. “Your BBC employers gave you the thumbs-up.”
“Good of them.”
He looked sharply at my face, correctly interpreted my mild cynicism and took me to meet the team of meteorologists dealing with Odin. So it was I who was the other damn fool, they said, who’d flown through Odin’s eye and ditched near the eye wall? I was.
It was crazy to have attempted a fly-through, they said. Amateur hurricane hunters were a pest. The U.S. Air Force’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Flight alone had enough experience and instrumentation.
I meekly agreed. My pal Will returned my cynicism doubled, accepted my contrition and showed me how the storm trackers were still worried about Odin, which had changed direction yet again and was now very slowly passing from the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico, where it at present distantly threatened Galveston in Texas. The warm Gulf waters were again strengthening the circulation dangerously. Neither Will nor I could understand how I’d survived the weight of the towering seas.
When I suggested a thank-you drink at the end of his shift Will looked at his watch and said he’d already arranged for me to meet someone I might find interesting, and when we were settled at a small sidewalk table under a red-and-blue sun umbrella, we were joined by a lanky bearded sixtyish eccentric who slapped Will vigorously on the back, told me his name was Unwin and demanded, “What exactly do you want to know about Trox Island?”
Taken by surprise I said “Er ...” irresolutely, and then with gratitude, “More or less anything you can tell me.”
He could tell me about forty minutes’ worth, he said. He’d done the research for a book on Trox, but couldn’t find a publisher interested. He had been to the island many times himself as pilot of the weekly Dakota, an ancient DC-3 that had flown in with perishable supplies for the thirty or more people who lived there.
He said those residents were mostly meteorologists and seismoilogists—who employed him—and mushroom growers and timber and coconut merchants, and in the past there had been a great trade in guano. He said there were thousands of booby birds making the guano and hundreds of thousands of iguanas doing nothing. He said the island had once been used as a communications post by undercover agents from the United States, but the C.I.A. was now denying it. They had built the runway, though, and they once had a radio transmitter there, but it had been dismantled years ago.
I asked to whom the island belonged, and Unwin took a long time over his reply. “Once it was British, then American,” he said eventually. “Then a whole bunch of South American countries claimed it, but no one wanted to keep it longer than for their own purposes because there’s no running water there, only rain caught in cisterns, and no electricity, since one group who took it over looted the generator. So when they’ve finished with it each group just abandons it, it seems to me. Long before Hurricane Nicky, let alone Odin, a company called the Unified Trading Company were running things, but about a month ago they suddenly slammed down the shutters on harmless people like me.�
� He grinned, unexpectedly showing large yellow teeth. “If you want to own the island yourself, just go and live there, say it’s yours, and fight off all boarders.”
He interrupted his saga to attend to the cold Heineken ordered for us all by Will, and then, as if delighted to open the floodgates, went on.
“There was something funny about those mushrooms. I mean, a couple of real mushroom farmers I talked to said you’d never try to grow even exotic mushrooms on a commercial basis on such a small scale. They were experimental mushrooms, people said, but the Unified Trading Company brought in their own workers, from Europe, so no one local even knew what was really going on. And it was the same for the cows.”
“Cows?” Will asked, mystified. “What cows?”
Unwin the Trox specialist showed his teeth again. “One day when I was there a whole shipload of bulls and cows was disembarked and they walked up from the jetty, and through the village, and spread out all over the island. There was a heck of a fuss about it with the residents, but the bulls never chased or gored any humans. They just gored each other and rogered the cows, and bit by bit they grew tamer and had calves and spent most of their time keeping the runway grass short. Hell knows what Odin did to them, I should think they all died.”
Will reminded him I’d been on the island since Odin, and I told him how the cattle survived by huddling flat on their stomachs all together like a carpet. And why were they there in the first place? I asked, but the expert said he didn’t know.
He changed the subject to the scientists who had built both of the thick-walled huts and measured earthquakes on seismographs there and sent up radiosonde balloons to measure air pressure and temperature aloft each day. He knew them all by name as he worked for them, flying the Dakota.
The Unified Trading Company had taken over the second hut, and Unwin, frowning, said that towards the end the residents had told him the second hut had had a man guarding it with a rifle all the time, so that no one except the top men in the company could go in there. Those top men had said that as long as they were there as caretakers, the island belonged to them.
“A right muddle,” I commented. “Why did the caretakers leave?”
Unwin leaned back in the wrought-iron café chair and assessed me from under lowered lids.
“Something frightened the residents,” he slowly said.
I asked, “Do you know what it was?”
Unwin hesitated, then said they were told the mushroom sheds had become radioactive and the houses were unsafe, with radon gas coming up from their foundations. “A boat came for everyone, though, and they loaded all their belongings onto it and sailed to Cayman, where most of them have relatives. But everybody left Trox at least a month ago, and no one’s developed radiation sickness, as far as I know.”
I let a minute or two pass, and asked, “Did you see any of the top men of Unified Trading guarding the hut when you were there?”
Unwin nodded and finished his beer. I waited with stifled impatience while he arranged for refills, but at length the source of all explanations agreed that yes, the top men, about five of them, had taken it in turns to stand guard over the hut, only actually they had sat on a chair in the doorway with a gun across their knees, and that had gone on for about a week, until the fishing boat arrived and took everyone to Cayman.
“Did the Unified Trading men come from Cayman?” I asked.
After deliberation he answered, “Some of them did.”
“And the others?”
Unwin answered straightforwardly, “I don’t know. First of all before they started the evacuation they brought a big heavy cardboard box in off the boat and rolled it up to the second hut, on a sort of cart with wheels they used there; and don’t ask me what was in the box. I don’t know.” He paused. “Everyone watched.”
The safe had been in the box, I thought.
“Did you go into the hut afterwards?” I asked.
“Everyone went in. The Traders didn’t stop people anymore but no one knew what they’d brought in the box, and there was nothing to see except the seismograph, which had been there before.”
“And ... um ... what did the top men look like?”
Unwin pondered and sighed. “They were all forty or fifty. They wore baseball caps, but they weren’t young. It was three or four weeks ago. I can’t remember.” He swallowed half a pint of beer, stood up and flapped a hand in a forty-minute farewell. “I’m going back to Trox next week.” he said. “I’m supposed to be taking people and things to help to rebuild the meteorological station.”
“What was all that about radioactivity?” Will asked, still mystified, watching Unwin’s vanishing back.
I looked at Will vaguely. “I don’t really know. Where does he live?”
“Over a hippie tee-shirt store, next road to the right. Unwin’s a funny fish. I thought he’d be more interesting. Sorry.”
I said, “He knew a lot about the place.”
Will nodded ruefully and said, “I’d hardly heard of Trox Island before you asked me about it.”
“That makes two of us. Let’s just forget it.”
His fast agreement to this shuffling-off suggestion was the basis of all our future friendship: he didn’t want to have to take anything seriously—except the weather, of course.
So I didn’t tell him I’d been sucked into some sort of conspiracy, and now the conspirators regretted it and would like to spit me out again. so to speak, but they wanted to be sure first that I hadn’t recognized them or understood why they needed to blindfold me to rescue me. All of that was more likely to alienate Will than engage his further help.
We finished our beers in easy accord, and he invited me without hangups to go on sharing his world wind news; while I offered him, as we parted, tours of the meteorological headquarters, back home at Bracknell, Berkshire.
Unwin, when I went looking for him, was sitting under another sun umbrella, drinking another beer.
I sat beside him. He shrugged and said, “Trox used to be a pretty place, you know.”
“Will you get back there by DC-3?”
“Sure.”
“Did the Unified Trading Company, too, use a regular airplane of their own to service their staff?”
Unwin, bored, drank his beer, yawned, and said that mostly they rented one, it was cheaper.
Did he know which airplane they rented?
He knew the type. When I wrote out the registration number, he nodded positively with recognition and awakening interest. “That’s the one. It belongs to Downsouth Air Rentals. You can charter it with or without pilot by the hour, day, week, whatever you like.”
He accepted another refill.
“If anything much happens on Trox.” I suggested, “anything odd, I mean. would you pass the info to Will, to forward it to me?” I gave him some money I could hardly afford and he counted it without enthusiasm.
“All right,” he agreed.
“I left my camera there, in one of the thick-walled huts, tied up by its strap to a beam near the roof, out of the cows’ reach. The camera’s useless. It’s all stuck up with mud. But I’d quite like it back, if you find it. If you send it to me, mud and all, how about a full case of Heineken?”
“Two cases,” he said. We shook on it, and I wrote for him my grandmother’s address.
I touched the small paper with the aircraft registration number on it and asked without hope, “I don’t suppose you know where I would find the fishing boat that did Trox Island’s evacuation?”
Unwin’s yellow teeth spread wide in a grin and he jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“You walk a bit lame,” he observed, “and you have a long way to go. She’s the Darnwell Rose, down to the end of the road, turn left, third ... no, fourth dock along. It’s not really a fishing boat. It’s an all-purpose offshore merchantman.”
I thanked him sincerely and started down the long road, and presently found him catching me up.
“I know the master. He’s sailing toni
ght. I owe him a beer,” he said, and I was glad of his company and his introduction.
The master of the Darnwell Rose, bulky, with gold sleeve rings, bushily bearded, went below with Unwin to more beer in his cabin, and sent up a fearsomely tough-looking second-in-command to unbutton to me about Trox.
“A trading company, Unified Traders, had chartered the Darnwell Rose to ship a whole load of household goods from Trox Island to Grand Cayman,” he said, “and there had been a question about clearing everything from regulations about radon gas, but they’d had no problem in the end. None of the furniture was radioactive. so we did the job.”
I asked, “Do you remember taking to Trox Island a heavy cardboard container?”
“The safe, do you mean?”
“Yes,” I nodded.
“Look,” he said. “If I tell you what happened, I’ll deny it.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“So,” he said, “to stop it getting damaged on the journey the safe door was wedged open with a lot of screwed-up paper and there was a folder type of thing lying in a drawer in a desk nearby, and as we were to take all the furniture, one of the deckhands put the folder in the safe and took the desk, and when everything had been cleared by the Geiger counter they put that too in the safe, meaning both things only to be there for a minute or two, but a seaman shut the safe door and they couldn’t open it again—so they just put the whole safe into the slot in the wall that was ready for it, and left it there, and no one ever complained. The master reckoned the trading company that chartered us knew how to get the door open again. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“That’s fine, thank you:”
I gave him the rest of my dollar bills, thanked Unwin and the master and gratefully accepted their offer of a ride to the airport.
Deciding, before I caught the night flight to London, that helping the conspirators to get rid of me neatly involved a polite goodbye to Robin Darcy (who’d lost his airplane to our foolhardiness, after all), I called his number but heard only Evelyn’s voice saying, “Please leave a message.”
