by Cave, Hugh
"Almost. Some would say 'Me soon come.’ "
"You see how quickly I'm picking things up!"
Peter grinned. Alton Preble, already at work on the books, looked up with a frown of censure. To Peter he said, "Tell me something, Mr. Sheldon. When you pay your workers, don't you ever have them sign? Page after page here just lists a string of names with the amount paid out for weeding, fertilizing, and so on, but never a signature to prove they were actually paid.'
"We pay on Fridays, starting at four o'clock, Mr. Preble. In the beginning I tried for signatures and found myself still at it at eight."
"Pardon?"
"Too many can't write their names but, out of pride, insist on trying. Have you ever seen a signature slowly and laboriously drawn—like a picture?"
"I see. But do your tax people accept this?"
"They understand the problem."
With a shake of his head the barrister returned to his work—using, Peter noticed, a small, battery-powered calculator half-hidden behind the stack of account books. Edith had disappeared, apparently to change from her white cotton dress into something more suitable for mountain climbing. From outside came the growl of a heavy vehicle toiling up the plantation road to the Great House yard.
Peter walked out onto the veranda. In front of the old carriage house a covered gray-green truck had stopped, and men in khaki were jumping out of it as though executing some kind of military maneuver.
A short, husky fellow about thirty years old jumped down from the seat beside the driver and approached the veranda steps. Looking up at Peter, he briskly saluted. " 'Morning, sir. Mr. Sheldon, is it?"
"Good morning. Yes, I'm Sheldon."
"Sergeant Wray, sir. The corporal in the village told me—"
"I know. Come on up, please."
Sergeant Wray climbed the steps and they shook hands. "I'll show you the rooms we have available," Peter said, thinking, Good Lord, why didn't I tell Edith while I had the chance? But, of course, he hadn't expected the military invasion to take place so soon. MacQuarrie at the police station had said they were coming, not that they were already on the way.
He had another problem now. Unless he wished to display a certain rudeness by walking his caller back down the veranda steps and around to a door at the rear, he would have to escort him through the room where Alton Preble was working at the table. He chose the interior route, and the Englishman looked up.
Peter stopped. "Mr. Preble, this is Sergeant Wray of the island's Defense Force. He and his men are among those searching for the scouts. Sergeant, Mr. Preble, from England."
Remaining in his chair, the barrister acknowledged the introduction with a nod. The sergeant said, "Good morning, sir."
Peter led the way to bedrooms in the rear. "Will these do, Sergeant?"
"Certainly, sir. And it's very kind of you."
"No trouble at all. I want to find those boys as much as you do. But I'm puzzled. If they ran into trouble near Blackrock, why are you working out of here? I should think Whitfield Hall—"
With a pair of solid-looking hands planted on his hips, the sergeant said, "Other men are working out of Whitfield, sir. But we aren't sure just where those two became separated from the rest. They said it was near Blackrock, but when they were closely questioned, they didn't seem to know where it was."
"Changed their stories, you mean?"
"Not so much that. They just seemed to be confused and couldn't remember things with any certainty. The way I heard it, they were trying very hard to help us but couldn't seem to get their minds in order. As if they were not quite right in the head, sir."
"So you're planning to begin here where they did and go the whole route," Peter guessed.
"That’s it, sir. And we be leaving at once."
"Now?"
"Every minute may be precious. The lads left here nine days ago, and that's a long time to be up there in those mountains with only three or four days' food." The sergeant hesitated. "Let me ask you something, sir, if I may. Do you happen to know if any of those fellows had ever done this kind of thing before?"
"Their leader said he had. At least, he'd been up there somewhere, and they were counting on him to keep them from getting lost. I understand he was only recently made a scoutmaster, though."
"Their leader. Linford Grant, you mean."
"I believe that's his name."
"That's it. Linford Grant. Sir, I'd like to ask a favor. Could you perhaps draw us a map of the route they planned to take?"
"I can draw you one of the way from Armadale to Morgan Peak," Peter said. "I've been there several times. From there they planned to travel west along the ridge to Blackrock and descend into Chester Parish. Wait, though." It was his turn to hesitate. "You mean you and your men have never been up there?"
"No, sir, we haven't."
"You ought to have a guide, then. Perhaps I can find one for you."
"That would be very kind of you."
"Bring your men in and get them settled. I'll see what I can do."
On returning to the dining room, Peter found Edith talking to her barrister, and told them what was going on. Edith seemed eager to cooperate. She was wearing khaki slacks now and a long-sleeved khaki shirt.
"Where will you go to find a guide?" she asked.
"There are some men working in Field One, near the gate. I'll take the jeep down."
"May I come, as part of my tour?"
"Of course."
When he stopped the jeep by the gate, the men he sought were scattered through the field, using machetes to chop out weeds and grass. At the beep of the horn they straightened from their backbreaking task and came to see what was wanted. He spoke first to the oldest one, a tough, wiry fellow of seventy. On his hikes to the Peak, Emmanuel Williams had always been not only willing but eager to be one of the group.
But when asked if he would guide the soldiers, Williams scarcely gave the request a thought. "No, squire. Me not going up there now after what happen to the boys-them."
"But, Manny, you've always—"
"No, suh. Me not doing it!"
"Don't tell me you're afraid."
"Yes, suh! Me frighten!"
"What about the rest of you?" Peter's gaze traveled from face to face, and all were good, strong faces. "There's money in it, you know. More than you can earn here. "
Peter," one said, "no money can pay us to seek out the devil in him den. The soldiers-them don't know what we know. Them is playing with hellfire."
He knew better than to argue. They would do almost anything for him, as a rule. After a big rain, for instance, when leaves in the river cut off the plantation's water supply by choking the intake at the river, these same men would fight their way up through the waterfalls to clear the screen without even being asked. But this involved fear of the unknown.
"I'll have to try down in Grove Path," he said to Edith.
But the little community down the road also rejected his plea for help, and Look Up, he guessed, would be the same. The truth was, if Manny Williams could not be persuaded to go, the quest for a guide was certain to fail. Manny had spent half a lifetime hunting wild pigs in those high-up places and must be listened to.
Reluctantly Peter drove back to the Great House and reported his failure to Sergeant Wray.
"I would be glad, then, if you would draw me the map I mentioned," Wray said.
From a filing cabinet in his office Peter took a surveyor's map of Armadale—an old one drawn long before Philip Craig's acquisition of the property. While he used it as the basis for a sketch of the route to the Peak, the sergeant stood beside him and studied it in fascination, reading aloud such notations as "Great Broken Ground," "Inaccessible Precipices," "Tremendous Deep Hole," and "Great Overhanging Rock."
"Lord, sir," Wray said in awe, "it don't sound very nice up there!"
"I believe it's even worse along the ridge. I can only tell you what I told the scouts. Be very careful."
Wray carefully folded the sketch map and
tucked it into his shirt pocket. "Thank you, sir. We'll be leaving now."
"When shall I expect you back?"
"When you see us."
They shook hands. "By the way," Peter said, "did the corporal at the police station tell you about the Dakin boy in Look Up? The one who insists he is cold and wet and somehow imprisoned?"
"Yes, sir, he did."
"And do you think it may be a clue?"
"I'm bound to say I'm doubtful. I can only say if we come across any place that seems to fit the lad's description, we'll be sure to look at it."
From the Great House veranda, with Edith Craig at his side, Peter watched them go. Alton Preble had even abandoned the books long enough to come and watch with them. It was an impressive sight: ten men in spic-and-span khaki briskly striding up the main coffee track behind their chunky, short-legged leader. Each of them wore a knapsack and had a rifle slung from a shoulder.
They would be a lot less brisk and natty by the time they reached the Peak, Peter thought. And probably not so eager. Glancing at his watch, he turned to the woman standing beside him at the veranda's old wooden railing. "It's quarter to ten, Miss Craig." He simply could not call her Edith in front of Preble. "Would you like to do some hiking, too?"
"Indeed I would."
"Sure you won't come, Mr. Preble?"
"Another time, perhaps. If we're here long enough, that is. Which I doubt."
Edith said, "Do you suppose we could take along some sandwiches, Peter? Then we won't feel obliged to hurry back for lunch."
"I'll ask Coraline to make some."
He hurried away, noting that barrister Preble did not look exactly happy.
9
ALTON PREBLE WAS NOT HAPPY. NOT HAPPY AT ALL. Left alone in the Great House except for the housekeeper, who was downstairs in the kitchen, he did his best to concentrate on the plantation books for the next half hour, then gave up and walked back out to the veranda. There, stiffly motionless in one of the wide-armed cedar chairs, he gazed unseeing into sunlit space and sought to analyze his feelings.
He could understand why Edith liked Armadale. Of course. The serenity of the place after the hurly-burly of London. The spectacular beauty of these tropical mountains. The charming ignorance or unworldliness of the peasants, with their amusingly primitive patois. Yes, yes, he could understand.
And, after all, St. Alban had been a colony of England until a few years ago, and was still more English than anything else.
But there was another face on the coin about which Edith was almost totally ignorant.
Not he. Even before her father's death, knowing Edith would sooner or later become Mrs. Alton Preble, he had made a point of learning as much about St. Alban as he could. Because it would be hers eventually, and the prospect of owning a coffee estate on a West Indian island had both intrigued and frightened him.
She would want to go there, naturally. Not to stay—that would be out of the question when she was his wife—but perhaps to spend a certain amount of time there each year. In which case he would of course face the prospect of having to go with her or remaining in London without her. So.
There were ways of finding out things when you put your talents to work. At the library he discovered a St. Alban daily newspaper called the Island Post and promptly arranged to have it sent to him regularly by mail. It wasn't the Times, of course, but it did cover happenings in the island. It was also blessed with a perceptive and obviously courageous columnist—one who called himself William Bold—who could actually write.
One thing about St. Alban had become apparent almost at once. As he had remarked to Edith only a few hours ago, while on the way here to Armadale, for an island of its size it seemed to be far too violent a place. The Post's front-page stories had brought this home to him from the very beginning and continued to shock him at least once a week.
He hadn't told Edith he was subscribing to the island's newspaper. That was his own little secret. His ace in a hole, a gambling person might say, there to be played if she forced him to use it.
Thinking about it now, with his long face ridged in frown lines, Preble rose suddenly from his veranda chair and went striding back into the house. Although slightly worried that the people in customs might question his reason for having such stories in his luggage, he had taken the risk of bringing some Post clippings with him to St. Alban. The chap in customs had spent most of his time beaming at Edith, and the clippings were now in his room.
Preble returned with them to his veranda chair and sat again. It was important, he felt, to prepare himself for the possibility—God forbid it should become a reality!—that Edith might decide she wanted to keep the plantation and retain the American chap to continue running it for her. With a barrister's trained eye he went through the clippings to refresh his memory of what they contained.
The stories he had saved were grim. Here was one about a family of four being slain and dismembered in their home by one or more intruders who had left no clue to their identities. The young parents slaughtered in their bed, the two very young children, a boy and a girl, in theirs. Machetes had been the weapons, apparently. According to the newspaper, the house had resembled an abattoir.
An equally grim story had appeared only a month later. There had been so many robberies, it seemed, that many residents of the capital's most affluent suburb, called Langley, had had bars installed at their windows. But in this case the bars had not afforded the expected protection.
Appearing at a living-room window while the elderly man of the house and his equally elderly wife were watching television, the unknown assailant in this case had thrust the barrel of an automatic rifle—an automatic rifle in little St. Alban, for God's sake—through the glass and ordered the husband to go to the front door and unlock it, "or I shoot your wife." When the poor fellow opened the door, two accomplices of the gunmen were waiting there to step in and attack him with knives.
All three of them, then, had pursued the wife, who fled upstairs and locked herself in a bathroom. They broke the bathroom door down and attacked her as well.
Hearing the screaming, neighbors next door had telephoned the police. But the police arrived too late. The intruders were gone. The husband was dead, the wife dying, though she was still able to tell what had happened. Money the pair had withdrawn from a bank that day for a visit to their married daughter in England was missing. So was the wife's jewelry and everything else of value that was small enough to be carried off.
The frown lines on Alton Preble's face deepened as he went through the rest of his clippings. So much violence, he thought. Why?
There was violence in the island's history, of course. The slaughter of the gentle Arawak Indians by Spanish explorers. The struggle that had brought about a change of ownership from Spanish to English. The buccaneers with their bloody plundering. But why now? Why today? This was not the Middle East.
The question was echoed in a column by William Bold.
"What is happening to our once-civilized little island?" Bold had written,
True, it was never the paradise depicted in the travel folders. Such paradises exist nowhere. But we were reasonably peaceful here except when certain conscienceless politicians stirred up the more ignorant among us for the sake of obtaining votes. We were not more violent than the people of other Caribbean countries.
Now look carefully at what has been happening here over the past ten years, if you will. Crimes of violence have increased in St. Alban nearly 900 percent, according to police and Defence Force figures. And what violence! These merciless slayings have not been the work of amateur thieves caught in the act of committing routine robberies. They have not been ordinary crimes of passion. Only a few have been political.
No. What we are seeing more and more are the senseless, totally ruthless acts of men who appear to revel in violence for its own sake. You don't just break into a house and rob it; you hack or club its residents to death. You don't simply command a victim on some dark street to hand y
ou his wallet; you rip him open with a knife even after he has obeyed you. You don't simply rape a woman; when you have satisfied your list, you disembowel her.
Something is going on here. Something hideous and terrifying. We seem to be breeding a kind of criminal who has sold his soul to the devil and actually enjoys committing the most shockingly evil crimes for the sheer joy of doing so.
I weep for my beloved island. Weep with me.
Alton Preble stopped reading and simply sat there on the Armadale veranda, gazing into space again. Should he show these clippings to Edith?
Wait, he decided. She was a good, sensible woman. In a very short time the island and the plantation were bound to lose their attraction for her, and she would be only too glad to return to England.
He was glad he had brought the clippings, though. There was a side of Edith that disturbed him at times, even occasionally made him somewhat apprehensive. It would be good to have an ace in the hole, just in case.
10
EDITH AND PETER WERE HIGH ABOVE THE OLD GREAT House when they stopped to eat the lunch Coraline Walker had prepared for them.
As they toiled up the main track, which had recently been cleaned so the new owner might be suitably impressed, Peter had shown his employer some of the best of her coffee fields. In them the trees were eight feet tall, with leaves that seemed to have been dipped in dark green enamel that hadn't dried yet. He thought she was pleased. At least, as they continued the climb she asked question after question.
"I'm sure I should have read some books on the growing of coffee before I came here," she said apologetically. "But there never seemed to be time. I had so much else to do after Daddy died. You must forgive my ignorance."
He not only forgave it; he welcomed the chance to acquaint her with some of the many problems. How, for instance, the serpentine soil here was so light that he had chosen to use chicken manure instead of commercial fertilizer, though it meant trucking the manure from a poultry farm miles away. How, because forest rats were fond of coffee and always selected the plumpest red cherries, his workers had to lace the fields with warfarin blocks each year before the coffee ripened.
