by Basil Copper
“How did things go?” I asked him.
“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “Nassau were a bit dubious at first about our suggested arrangement, but they finally saw it my way.”
By the faint smile I caught on his face, I gathered that it had been an amusing conversation. Stella said nothing and her face was buried in a cup of coffee, so I couldn’t see her expression.
“Then we’re in,” I said.
“Precisely,” said Clay, neatly spearing a segment of grapefruit with the sharp edge of his spoon. He lowered his voice. “I haven’t exactly been idle after I left this morning.”
“You could have fooled me,” I said looking pointedly at his immaculately tailored figure.
“We got a rundown on the yachts at Stanley Bay last night, together with the general shipping movements,” he said. “I’ve authorised the Chicago call and we can do that about midday. This is what I believe you wanted.”
He passed over a closed pasteboard folder.
“Let me have the name of the officer concerned and the details and I’ll put a copy of this on plane to Nassau so they can radio it to Chicago,” he said.
I opened the little folder. It was rather like a passport, except that Carl Grosvenor looked rougher than when I had last seen him. Even so Doc Griffith had done a pretty good job on him. I’ve seen worse things in old Boris Karloff movies.
Griffith must have some trouble with the eyes, but he’d managed to get them open and the expression wasn’t too bad; the police photographer had photographed him as though he were looking downward, and apart from a slight droop to the eyelids he looked pretty normal. But it was obvious Karsh hadn’t taken it. I didn’t show the picture to Stella. I didn’t want to spoil her holiday.
“I’ll hang on to this,” I told Clay. “It might come in useful later.”
Then I told him about my visitor. He looked at me narrowly and picked up his coffee cup. He didn’t say anything for a minute. He just drained the cup and sat looking out over the sea. The only sign he gave was a light drumming of his fingers on the table top. Then he wiped his lips fastidiously with his napkin.
“I take it you’ve a very good reason for not calling me last night, Michael?” he said presently.
I finished off another piece of toast and reached for the marmalade again.
“It’s like this, Colonel,” I said. “Firstly, the guy was so big he could have taken the whole hotel apart. Secondly, we didn’t discuss anything, that could have tied him in with a crooked roulette wheel, let alone a murder. Thirdly, he can’t get off the island. Fourthly, free, he may lead us to someone else. And fifthly, it was a stupid deal to tip off his hand like that. I figured if we kept him on the loose he might lead us to better things.”
The Colonel nodded. He was smiling now. “All right, Michael,” he said. “I’ll go along with that. All the same it may lead to considerable risk for you.”
“That doesn’t worry me,” I said. “What I can’t figure is why he should have come right out in the open. Looks like whoever he’s working for is suffering from an overdose of confidence. It was pretty cool stuff, what with the hotel swarming with police and all.”
“I take it you didn’t discount that he might be a guest at this hotel?” Stella asked quietly.
“Pretty good, sweetie,” I said. “I had a word with Inspector Phillips before we came in to breakfast. He’s checking the register and questioning the staff now. But I don’t think these boys are that stupid. Over-confident, yes, but that would be pretty foolhardy.”
I turned back to the Colonel. “Apart from risking a charge of breaking into a guest’s room Camera didn’t really stick his neck out. He may have a licence for the gun, we didn’t discuss a thing of importance and he could have told the hotel staff he’d gotten into the wrong room by mistake. And it’s only a hunch on my part that he and his Chicago mobster chum were in that boat last night.” Stella got up as I finished speaking. “Well,” she said, “I expect you’ve got a busy day. I’ll be on the beach if you want me.”
“See you for lunch,” I said.
“Don’t count on it,” she said and went on out. I watched her can until it was out of sight. Then I found my cigarette butt was burning my fingers. Colonel Clay was regarding me quizzically.
“What about those refrigeration plants?” I asked him defensively.
“We checked a couple at the main dock at Stanley Bay last night,” he said. “A clean sheet as far as we can make out, but we’ve got to question all the labour force. They don’t do any killing on the premises. I’ve got a list of another dozen places, three on adjoining islands.”
He threw me over a sheet of typed paper. I saw it was headed, “Copy for Mr. Faraday”; I skimmed down the list of addresses. “Where do we go from here?” I asked him.
“Well,” he said, “if you can spare the time, I thought we could run down to the office and get this photo-wire business sorted out. We’ve got the call itself fixed for midday. I’m having the mainland and the island ice depots checked but there’s several on out islands. If I can get a spare launch we’ll have a look at one or two places ourselves, time permitting.”
“Suits me,” I said. We went on out. I waved to the McSwaynes as we passed the window. The Colonel had his Alvis parked in the forecourt in front of the hotel. I sighed as I looked down towards the beach. A girl in a scarlet bikini was running into the surf, sending up sparkling diadems of spray that fell back into the sea like flecks of snow. It looked like Stella. I hoped we’d be back in time. I didn’t know Stella had bought a bikini. This I had to see.
A shadow swept across the crowded swim-pool and the beat of a motor came to our ears. One of the inter-island planes that connected the island with Nassau sliced the blue, tilted its wings and settled up on course, heading out to sea. I sighed again and followed the Colonel out to the car.
2
The Colonel drove fast, but skilfully; usually I don’t like being a passenger, but I felt safe with him. In no time at all, it seemed, we had arrived at Stanley Bay, and I felt the big hand which had been pressing my back into the upholstery relax its grip, as he slackened speed. I caught the Colonel’s eyes in the driving mirror; there was a slight spark of humour in them.
Stanley Bay was a bigger place than I had expected; we rolled down a broad boulevard between pink and white villas with open green lawns edged with scarlet and white flowers. A Union Jack floated listlessly from a flagpole and I caught a glimpse of a couple of old cannon looking out to sea over stone battlements.
A large yacht rode at anchor about a mile off shore, with a flock of sailboats moored around her. Then we turned a comer and were in the harbour proper. The Alvis made hardly any noise as we idled along a jetty, past cream painted warehouses and stores. The Harbour-Master’s office slid by and the Colonel pulled the Alvis in to a space marked Police Vehicles Only. I followed him into a modest, two-storey stone building. It had trim manicured lawns around two sides of it and more cannon.
We went in a door under a sign painted black on white which said POLICE OFFICE: there was some kind of crest under it, but I didn’t get time to see it. It was cooler inside; the office was painted pale-green and a native constable sat at a plain wooden table and fooled with a sheaf of papers. A fan circulated in the ceiling and through the big window facing the harbour I could see a couple of police launches dancing alongside a POLICE ONLY jetty.
Another constable was sitting near a small telephone switchboard and a native sergeant kept an eye on the whole show as he turned out reports on a neolithic typewriter. He gave Clay a broad smile as we went by. The Colonel led the way through a second door in back. His own office was painted cream and had a grey carpet. An identical view of the harbour was pasted outside the window.
There was a more ornate desk, three green telephones, an umbrella stand and Inspector Phillips riffing through the bumf in a regulation green filing cabinet which gaped open at the side of the room.
“Hullo, sir,”
he said as he caught sight of Clay. He nodded pleasantly at me. “I’m glad you came in. I’m just off down to North Shore Drive to check the deep freeze plant. Nothing you want me for in the meantime?”
“No thank you, Ian,” Clay told him. “You’ve made out the report I take it?”
“On the desk, sir.” Phillips nodded towards the window. “I’ll take the truck then and get off. Nothing positive so far, I’m afraid. It’s all in the report.”
He nodded again and went on out.
“A good lad,” Clay grunted, “but he’s inclined to work too much on his own if I don’t watch it. Too many forms though. I agree with him there.”
He went and sat down at the desk and leafed through the mass of paper with an eloquent forefinger. Then he glanced up at me with apology. “Sorry, Michael. Take a pew, won’t you?”
He indicated an armchair placed in front of the desk and I sat down. It was so comfortable I could have stayed there all day but I had other fish to fry. While he went through the report I studied the picture of Grosvenor again; he looked deader than ever. Then I wrote down the name of my friend in the Chicago Police and the details for the cable. When I had finished Clay got up and took the piece of paper outside. I heard him giving instructions to the sergeant. He came back in.
“We radioed Nassau earlier and they’ve laid everything on,” he said. “As soon as they hear from us now they’ll transmit the message and the picture to the Chicago police.”
“The wonders of science,” I said.
Clay went and stared thoughtfully out of the window at the sea-sparkle and the yachts at anchor. “How long do you think it will take?” he said.
“The Chicago call?” I told him. “Difficult to say. We might get a reply by tomorrow if they have any record on Grosvenor. But if the name and address are phoney it may take quite a while. Of course the picture will simplify things if he has a criminal record or his prints are on file.”
Clay came back again and sat down at his desk and shuffled his papers.
“Did you turn up anything in his room?” I asked.
He shook his head. “A complete blank. A negative too on the ice depots, though we haven’t finished there by any means. These two fellows you saw must be on one of these boats somewhere; we’ve had no reports from any hotels at all and no-one like that has left from the airport. The only plane out in the last twenty-four hours carried fourteen passengers and half of those were women and children.” He sighed and reached for his cigarettes. I noticed he had a silver cigarette box on the desk. I took one of the Russians with the cardboard cylinder, from the other side of the box. There’s no sense in carrying anti-Communism too far. It was a good cigarette.
“I wish I had a bigger staff,” said Clay. “What we really need is a boat-to-boat search, but that may take days.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “This guy is too big to hide indefinitely. Do you mind if I take a look at the yacht register, or whatever it is you’ve got there?”
He passed over a sheaf of paper. I soon saw there must have been something like two hundred boat names on it. He saw the look on my face and chuckled.
“This covers every harbour and bay on the island,” he said. “I don’t propose to search every duck-punt, if that’s what you were thinking. We’ve marked every sizeable craft with an asterisk and we’ve eliminated those owned by residents known to us.”
I thumbed down the list. The biggest boat there was The Gay Lady. I looked out of the window again.
“That the one?” I asked.
He nodded. “We haven’t been aboard yet. Belongs to a millionaire fellow from New York, according to our records.”
I went over to the hat-stand and opened up a brown leather case that was hanging there.
“Do you mind?” I asked. I put the glasses to my eyes. They were made by Zeiss, of course, as I had guessed they would be and the magnification of the coated lenses brought up the detail of The Gay Lady in startling close-up. I looked out at the yacht for a quarter of an hour. I don’t know what I was looking for, but if it was a big man with a little fellow I was sure disappointed.
There was a big, chunky man though; he wore white drill trousers and a white, open-neck shirt. From the way the crew behaved when they passed around him, I took him to be the owner. I couldn’t see his face properly; it was too far, even for these glasses. He stood under an awning in the stem of the yacht and smoked a cigar. I could see the thick blue smoke clearly in the sunshine. He didn’t move all the time I watched him. I put down the glasses thoughtfully. The Colonel sat watching me.
“What about this ice depot you were talking about?” I said.
“You’ve got the list in your pocket,” he said. “I thought the Ajax Company might be a good place for us to start. It’s on one of the nearer islands.”
I had another look at the list. The Ajax Cold Storage Company was at a place called Cucumber Cay. That didn’t tell me much.
“You’d better have this,” added the Colonel, throwing me a letter. “You’ll find it more useful than a gun out here.”
It was a brief document on police notepaper to say that the bearer, one Michael Faraday, had the sanction of the island police force and was to be afforded every facility by members of the general public, etc., etc. It was signed by Colonel Clay at his most official and had some sort of imposing stamp at the bottom of it.
“Thanks,” I said and put it in my wallet. By this time it was nearly half-eleven and we would be putting through the call at midday. It had to go through Nassau which was the reason for all the palaver. I could see Clay had some more paperwork to attend to so I excused myself and strolled down to the jetty. I had a look at the two police launches; they were powerful jobs and I was interested to see they were fully equipped, with searchlights. I looked through the wheelhouse windows of one and could see a crowded carbine rack fixed into the bulkhead. So much for Colonel Clay’s unarmed police force, I thought, but I guess there is some difference between revolvers carried on the person and rifles. And they might well need the latter at sea. I stared out across towards The Gay Lady again but the figure in the stern had gone. It was now around ten to twelve so I strolled back to the office. After a few minutes the switchboard constable called Clay over; he handed the mouthpiece to me. There was a lot of static on the line but the voice was surprisingly clear. “Barney?” I said. It had been a person to person call but I couldn’t recognise his tones at first.
Barney had been quite a chum of mine when he worked with the official force in L.A. under Captain Dan Tucker about half a dozen years before. Now he was a Captain of Detectives in Chicago and if anyone could find out anything about Grosvenor he was the guy best equipped to do it.
We chit-chatted for a minute or so and then I got down to business; it was an expensive call and I knew Clay had his eye on the office clock. I thought he was afraid the Queen would give him a hot-foot if he couldn’t justify his expenses sheet at the end of every month.
I told Barney the set-up and he confirmed that the photograph had been radioed and was going through Records at that moment. There was something else fretting around the back of my mind; I hadn’t mentioned it to the Colonel because it was so nebulous but it strengthened the Chicago angle.
“I ran into a little man down here who might know something about it, but I can’t place him,” I said. “I saw him in a police line-up in L.A. about two years ago and his face stayed in my mind. He’s a little guy with mean eyes. Sorry I can’t be more specific. I think he was booked in L.A. for suspected armed robbery if that helps any. But I know he worked out of Chicago and had a police record there.”
Barney took the details down. I looked at Clay. His face was expressionless but the constable was smiling. Barney said he’d come back on the wire at the same time tomorrow. I thanked him and hung up.
“Thank you, Michael,” said Clay, leading the way out of the office. One of the constables followed us, walking a couple of yards behind. We went down to the jetty.
<
br /> “You didn’t mention anything about this other man,” Clay said as we walked.
“It’s all very vague,” I said. “It’s the same little man who was in the boat with the big fellow. I didn’t want to say anything until I had something better to go on.”
He nodded. “Well, thanks again. You’ve already been a tremendous help. This might not be so difficult as we think.”
He seemed remarkably optimistic, I thought, but I kept it to myself.
3
“If you don’t mind, Colonel,” I said, “I’d like to spend a quarter of an hour on the jetty before we shove off.”
He hesitated. “Why, surely, if you really want to…”
“I’ve got a good reason,” I told him.
He had his glasses dangling from a leather strap slung over his shoulder. I tapped the case with my finger.
“If you can make yourself inconspicuous in the launch,” I said, “keep your glasses trained on The Gay Lady for the next quarter of an hour. You may see nothing, but on the other hand it might be interesting.”
He got down into the launch, sat on one of the stern lockers and started focussing the binoculars. I went down the jetty a way. I knew what I was looking for. Every seaport however small always has one of them. There’s always a longshore loafer who knows all the news of the harbour, who sits all day in the sun and runs the occasional errand for the price of a drink.
Sure enough, it didn’t take me long to find him. He was a thin, melancholy-looking man with dim, watery eyes and a peaked nose. His comic-opera-type striped jersey only accentuated his thinness and his ancient, gold-leafed yachting cap was liberally spotted with bird-droppings.
“He stoppeth one in three,” I said to myself.
“Eigh,” he mumbled, looking at me apprehensively. He obviously hadn’t heard of Coleridge, and it wouldn’t have done any good if I’d told him, so I let the point slide.
