Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The fairway for the eighth lay between two half-made reservoirs. You could hear the soft roar of the machinery before driving off; then on the right loomed the raised lake, with yellow hopper and red chute in full operation. On the left, a sunken yard dug from the limestone was filled with machinery and equipment: hoppers, stacks of timber, bundles of pipes, red oil-cans and big silvery drums of gas. A three-sided warehouse held more plants and tools and some cars; rows of spares for the sprayers; rows of the long fan-shaped brushes I had seen being used on the greens. They were marked Little Helper.

  We holed out and moved on. The ninth led to another lake. On the left, rows of stilted roundettes were in the process of roofing; the air was filled with the dry pleasant smell of sawn wood. The tenth was beside the new embryo tennis-courts, but from the fairway to the skyline on all sides was palmetto scrub. High on the left, someone had built a crow’s nest, a look-out platform for condominium clients, or snipers . . . Another lake. The eleventh: harmless, secluded, with the sun blazing down on its greenness the only shade in the centre, from a single buttonwood tree, low and wide with its grey scabbed bark and dark green willow-like leaves. Mr Tiko went off to study a strange yellow butterfly; Lady Edgecombe was playing silently and not very well; Wallace Brady was winning.

  Across Fairway Road and more heavy traffic. Workmen swarmed over a half-finished house: heavy tools lay about. The twelfth, and past Edgecombe’s own house. Seen from the golf-course the red poles on which it stood looked all of twelve feet in height. They had put in more hibiscus: the villa perched with its feet in palm trees and flowers, with the hum of its generator coming plainly down from the hut on the right. From the balcony, before the picture windows with their elegant drapes, Sir Bartholomew waved from his chair. Isolated, overlooking the whole empty fairway and the jungle of low trees and bushes set round it. A killer need only lie there under the bushes at night and then, if he were agile, climb up the poles.

  Brady waved back, and so did I. Lady Edgecombe gathered herself and played one excellent shot, the best for several holes, down the heart of the fairway. We sat in the carts and drove on.

  The thirteenth, a raised tee, and on its right a deep dry excavation for a reservoir; the sides scored with the wide-ladder marks of caterpillar tractors crossing and recrossing. At the bottom lay an unattached green harrow with spikes on its wheels. Why should I think of Johnson?

  Ahead, the pale green of a new lake in a deepish cut: the roofs of one or two other houses; the sound of dogs barking. Peanuts and Popcorn, perhaps, the pro’s chocolate poodles. And the fourteenth, turning back. We were on our way home: the sea, invisible, must be on our left. Then across Great Harbour Drive for the fifteenth and there was the water, pale turquoise ahead. To the right, an unexpected deep cutting and more machinery: another house, its roof newly timbered, its walls not yet completed. The sixteenth, separated from the sea only by a strip of flowering bushes, and the occasional pine.

  We stopped there, while Denise waded over the scrub without speaking, and went to stand alone on the beach. She gazed out to sea. Mr Tiko, who had played an unvarying average game with placid good humour, waited patiently, Wallace Brady walked over to me. I said, ‘I don’t want to play it out, unless anyone else does.’ He was four strokes better than I was; Lady Edgecombe poorest of all.

  Brady said, ‘I don’t mind, either way. The last two are a straight walk back into the clubhouse. We have to go that way anyway.’ He hesitated and said, ‘D’you think we should all ease up?’

  ‘Good Lord,’ I said. ‘What good would that do?’ Giving Lady Edgecombe the game wasn’t going to improve her ego. Only a dramatic improvement in her golf would do that. I don’t know what Brady was going to say; but just then Lady Edgecombe said something aloud.

  Mr Tiko, who was nearest, walked politely towards her. She repeated what she had said, and this time we could hear it. ‘She’s lost the brooch out of her pocket,’ I said. ‘End of game, end of problem. Leave things long enough and they’ll find their own answer.’

  ‘It worries me,’ said Wallace Brady, ‘to think that you think I’ll swallow that. Maybe you forget that civil engineers don’t get to be civil engineers with that kind of philosophy, any more than doctors do.’

  ‘But Lady Ambassadresses can,’ I said. But under my breath. Mr Tiko was volunteering to tramp back and look for the brooch. Brady, putting a good face on it, walked up and offered to do the same: so did I. We were about to split forces when Lady Edgecombe said, ‘No, you mustn’t, Beltanno. All that stooping with your poor head.’ I had forgotten my poor head and so, I swear, had she until that moment. She said, ‘Look, someone must go and tell Bart. He’ll be up at the clubhouse in a few moments, patiently waiting. Suppose Beltanno takes one of the golf-carts, and leaves us here with the other.’

  I didn’t mind, if she wanted the company of both men together. They were arguing who should go where, as I got into the cart and drove off.

  It was the first time I had operated one of those things. On my salary, you don’t lightly hire them. The brake was fiercer than I had expected, but the thing was stable enough, so long as one didn’t ask the impossible on a steep or an uneven gradient. I steered sedately over the road and along the seventeenth and eighteenth fairways, finding on my left one of the big rubber-lined reservoirs from which the underground pipes could be fed. An ingenious system.

  I had had, as I reviewed it, an excellent morning of golf. A piquant round of great comfort. Not one for tricks or nasty surprises or any of the crude and unpleasant hazards which tax one to extremity, in sport as in life. But a good game of golf.

  Sir Bartholomew was waiting, as predicted, on the patio of the clubhouse. He wouldn’t hear of my going back, but pressed on me instead his beach towel and his chair, ordered me a fruit-juice, and suggested that I should pass the time with a swim.

  He didn’t need to explain his gratitude any more than I my commiseration. I changed, thankfully, into the new swimming-suit and beach shirt I had left in my locker, picked up my swim cap for de-wigging with later, and made my way back to my tall, ice-filled drink by the pool.

  It was too hot to talk. In the baby blue water a long-haired girl swam showily and then got languidly out. The palms of the clubhouse were motionless and the seagrape in the corner hung its leaves like unpolished green sequins. Round the pool, the slatted beach chairs lay straddled like spiders, each with its burden of naked bronze flesh. Someone said politely, ‘You need to be oiled, lady, or you’ll get awful sore.’

  It was Paul, of the locket. I said, ‘Thanks, but I should be all right. I’ve been quite a lot in the sun.’

  He flashed his snowy capped teeth and waggled a finger. ‘Not there you haven’t. Call yourself a doctor, as well?’

  He was correct, I was annoyed to discover. The shape of my present swim-suit produced problems which were undoubtedly novel. ‘Now just you lie there,’ he said; and before I could stir, a large warm hand lapped in liquid spread itself over my central vertebrae and proceeded to massage, ably and hard. I gasped, and turned my head to one side in order to read his expression.

  He winked and continued unpausing. Feet had not even been mentioned. His impulses were entirely benign.

  Someone, three chairs away, was grumbling softly about something: someone else somewhere was laughing. But quietly. Everything was quiet. In the pool, empty now, a string of coloured floats moved with the air on its satiny surface, hand-in-hand like a dream-line of children. A brush hissed. A coloured boy, in a black lace shirt with pearl cufflinks, was spraying the bushes at the back of the open-air bar: his sneakers squeaked below bare brown ankles as he moved gently along. The sound mixed with the organ note of a plane coming in; the giant cricket hum of the generators. A whining buzz came from the cart room, where the sixty unused golf-carts sat in canopied rows, feeding umbilically, each from its meter. Paul said, ‘You’ve got a cute little figure. Ain’t no one ever told you before, Doc?’

  The girl from the rece
ption counter, running out on the back steps with the radio-transmitter box gripped in her hand, stood and screamed, ‘Doctor MacRannoch! Are you there! Doctor.’

  I was up and running, the beach shirt whipped over my shoulders, before she got another word out. She stood and stared at me gasping, her face stiff and the colour of yeast. I said, ‘Give me the transmitter. Take a deep breath. Now, what is it?’

  But I knew. I could hear the hubbub behind: people wakened, talking, asking; even Paul’s naked feet padding along, a late starter behind me. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

  The girl was still choking. I gave her a rap on the shoulder. ‘Come along. What is it?’

  She said, ‘That was the car from the beach. To say they’ve gone for the nurse. And Mr Brady said you’re to go too. They were looking for something -’

  ‘A brooch. I know. What happened?’ I said.

  ‘They didn’t find it. And Sir Bartholomew said to call off the search. And they called Lady Edgecombe but she didn’t answer. And Mr Brady went off to look. Then Mr Brady called from the thirteenth that he’d found her.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. My voice was calm. I trust, but I couldn’t believe it yet, the thing she was going to say.

  ‘l,ady Edgecombe was dead,’ said the girl. ‘They say her neck’s broken.”

  Denise. Not Sir Bart, but his wife.

  NINE

  ‘So she was gassed.’ said Johnson. ‘And deliberately, you fancy, Beltanno? Not a victim of environmental pollution?’

  ‘It would be hard to prove it,’ I said. ‘But I think a pad was pressed over her face.’

  ‘And then she was flung into the empty reservoir,’ Bart Edgecombe said. His two. hands were still clenched in front of his face. ‘Instead of me.’

  In forty minutes after it happened, Johnson had been there. It was the first thing I thought of, to summon him. He was known as a friend of the family: it seemed natural enough, I had hoped. I waited until the special constable came from the village and left him beside Bart, kneeling beside that sad covered body; and then got a lift in the company car up to Hilltop, the little restaurant which was also the transmitting-station to the outside world. Official messages had to be sent: to the hospital; to the C.I.D. at Nassau for a plane to come over.

  Crab Island didn’t have radio transmission, but Dolly had. I pinned my hopes to the fact that Spry would have sailed her from Nassau, and that Spry would be on board. He was; and I spoke to him while, in the coffee bar next door, people who hadn’t heard the news laughed and chattered under the ceilings and walls covered with autographs from the Americas and all over Europe: Surfside. Florida: Sundsvall, Sweden; Provo, Utah; Brighton, England; Vreeland a/d Vecht, Holland; Caracas, Venezuela; Hollywood.

  Brady and I met Johnson by the workers’ camp on the pier which the cargo ships used. We heard the engine before Dolly’s launch came in sight, low and white and extraordinarily fast. Johnson was alone, at the wheel. The boat cut an efficient arc through the water, reduced its power and murmured up to a mooring. In a moment he was ashore, and we were moving off in Brady’s Javelin SST.

  No one could have faulted my friend Johnson’s behaviour. Consternation. and a mild stimulation; so characteristic of sudden death, so identical with the feverish atmosphere of the clubhouse I had just left that it deceived even me for a moment. Then Brady dropped us at Edgecombe’s house, and I realized as we walked up the path that all those questions had had a point; and that although his greeting of Sir Bartholomew, huddled inside, might hold genuine feeling, it was merely the preamble.

  The Chairman of the Board had arrived, and whether we wanted it or not, we were about to hold a post-mortem in the fullest and ugliest sense of the word.

  It helped Edgecombe to talk. I had heard it before: Mr Tiko had gallantly tramped back to the fifth tee, where Denise had put the brooch in her pocket, and volunteered to search the next three holes. Brady had begun from No. 10, and Lady Edgecombe had begun walking back from the sixteenth, where she had discovered her loss. Sir Bartholomew, starting much later, had taken a golf-cart from the clubhouse to the tenth, and had caught up with Brady at the twelfth. They walked on from there together. It was Brady who had noticed the footmarks at the edge of the great white excavation to the right of the green, and had called Sir Bartholomew over to look.

  I had seen it as well. Unrolled like a ribbon over the crossed caterpillar tracks down the side of the chasm was the smooth undulating mark of a falling body, with the small rubble kicked up alongside. Lady Edgecombe lay at the bottom, where the harrow had been left with its sharp turning spikes. Luckily, most of what had happened to her was obliterated by the folds of a dusty tarpaulin.

  I was the only person who had picked up the tarpaulin and sniffed it. The smell of gas was then perfectly clear: the exterminating gas. and something else so faint I was unable to name it.

  ‘Chloro-picrin. They use it to fumigate the ground, don’t they?’ said Johnson. ‘If they’re replanting, or relaying turf on old ground. It kills the weeds and removes the bacteria. Were they planting there?’

  ‘Yes.’ said Sir Bartholomew. He removed his hands. Beneath, as happens, his face had aged a great deal. ‘They were creating a border of plants between the tee and the new lake. The tarpaulin was there when we passed earlier on. We think she picked it up . . .’ He stopped.

  ‘It was wet,’ I said. ‘We believe the sprinkler was on. In fact we know it was: the grass still had a big silver-blue patch where the spray had just fallen. We think the brooch must have lain in the path of the spray, and Lady Edgecombe picked up the tarpaulin and slung it over her head, before running in and snatching it up. She got as far as that anyway before the gas overwhelmed her. We found the brooch where she dropped it again, probably when she started coughing and choking near the edge of the quarry.’

  For a moment Johnson was silent, the bifocals in impersonal communion. Then, ‘If the victim was supposed to be you, Bart,’ he said, ‘why should they trouble to do anything more to Denise? Or do you think she genuinely fell over the edge?”

  ‘I think she saw whoever it was,’ Sir Bartholomew said, his voice rough. ‘I think the killer was there, ready to finish the job. Beltanno says unless you were trapped under that tarpaulin for any length of time, the gas wouldn’t kill you. But it would choke you for long enough for a determined man to do anything with you he wanted.’

  ‘Such as press a pad of ether or chloroform or whatever you like over your face and suffocate you before you went over,’ I said.

  ‘In the open air? In daylight?’ Johnson’s voice was merely clinical.

  I said, ‘Go down and look at it. There’s palmetto scrub to the horizon on every side. You can just see the sea on the right, and, if you look back, you can just see the triangle of the airport control-tower. But it’s secluded as three-quarters of the fairways on this course are secluded. The only possible interruption might have come from a service cart: there were plenty of them about. But if he used the tarpaulin as a shield, he might appear only to be sheltering Lady Edgecombe.’

  ‘Or he might have been in a red service cart himself,’ Johnson said. ‘Or in a golf-cart. What’s your view of Wallace Brady now. Bart?’

  ‘Only that I don’t want to see him again.’ Edgecombe said. He was beginning to lose his precarious poise. I caught Johnson’s eye, and he ignored me.

  ‘Have you found out any more about him?’ Johnson said mildly. Edgecombe put down his fists.

  ‘Have I found out anything? I’ve told you what I know. He’s American; he comes from Virginia; his family seem authenticated; he is a genuine engineer, and good at his job: he’s been here six months and expects to spend another three on his part of the development. He’s going on after that, I believe, to Caracas. He works all over the world He has never spoken out of turn or given the least cause for suspicion. In fact, he was good to -’ He balked at the name.

  He said, staring at Johnson, ‘What the hell more do you want from me? You’re the top
man. You’re the big shot with the money and resources. All you have to do is radio round your pals and you can find out what toothpaste he uses. But you didn’t bother to do it, did you? You didn’t check; you didn’t call in protection; you didn’t even trouble to keep an eye on the matter yourself. You were too damned keen to get off to Crab Cay and your latest -’

  ‘Actually, the Begum is James Ulric’s property,’ Johnson said. ‘But I’ll admit to a crazed liaison with Sergeant Trotter, if it’ll make you feel any better.’ He paused, and said quietly, ‘Brady has been checked out, of course. He’s clean, or appears to be. So are Krishtof Bey and Sergeant Trotter for that matter. All it means is that so far, no one has traced any misdemeanours they may have committed. Brady could have killed Denise. So could Mr Tiko. So could any one of several hundred men of the island’s labour force, if suitably paid. Do you honestly think she would still be alive, Bart, if I had moved in beside you with a revolver?’

  Edgecombe muttered something. I heard only ‘protection’.

  Johnson looked up. He said, ‘But you don’t get a wet-nurse with this job. You don’t even get good toilet and canteen facilities. You get permission to kill and be killed, with no questions asked. You’ve the training we all have, and the weapons we all have, and a fair number of your house staff, I expect, are in the Spoonmakers’ Union as well. What the hell more do you want?’ He got up and stood over Edgecombe, his hands in his pockets. ‘If someone’s killing you because he doesn’t like the shade of your socks, that’s too bad: that’s natural wastage. If someone’s killing you because you’re an agent, then he’s lying out there taking his time about it for a very good reason. He wants to see who else is going to drop off the rock-face and sprint for the play area.’