Deadly Deceit

by Jean Harrod

  Before David could answer, a loud female voice rang out. “For Chrissakes! We’re not eating out here all night with these mozzies, are we?”

  Jess turned to see a petite woman with shoulder-length auburn hair standing at the entrance. Her short black dress and plunging cleavage were eye-popping.

  The woman walked over to Jess and held out her hand. “Good to meet you, Jess.” She had a cut-glass accent. “I’m Sally, the Governor’s PA.”

  “Hello.” Jess shook her hand.

  “It’ll be great to have another woman from home in the office,” Sally said. Then she spotted Brad at the bar, and went straight over. She squashed him in her cleavage as she reached up to kiss him on both cheeks.

  David rolled his eyes.

  “Shit!” Sally slapped her arm in a dramatic gesture. “I’m going in to get some mozzie spray before I’m bitten to death.” And with that she teetered into the house, high heels clattering on the flagstones.

  “Now you’ve met Sally,” David said, flatly.

  Jess smiled, as more footsteps by the entrance made them all turn again.

  “Hi Carrie.” David came out quickly from behind the bar and walked over to a tall, young woman wearing black culottes and a halter neck top. With her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and tanned skin, she looked the stereotypical all-American girl. David kissed her on both cheeks and gave her a warm smile which, Jess noticed, Carrie returned. He beckoned to Jess. “Let me introduce you two.”

  But Carrie didn’t need his help. She walked over to Jess and shook her hand warmly. “Lovely to meet you, Jess, even if it is in such awful circumstances.” She turned back to David. “How’s the Governor?”

  “Still in an induced coma, while they assess the full extent of his injuries.”

  “Terrible,” Carrie said, quietly. “Has he been able to talk about the accident?”

  David shook his head.

  “So sad. We took the children to church this afternoon to say prayers for him.”

  Jess remembered that Carrie ran the local kindergarten.

  At that moment, Sally came back out of the house. She didn’t give Carrie the warm welcome she’d given Brad. She just nodded at her, and thrust a can of repellent at Jess. “They’ll love your new blood.”

  “Thanks.” Jess took the can. “I’d better go and change my top.”

  “We can go inside if that’s what everyone wants to do,” David said.

  “Don’t worry on my account.” Jess excused herself. “I’ll just be five minutes.”

  *

  Upstairs in her bedroom, Jess put on a long-sleeved blouse and sprayed on the mozzie repellent. She walked over to the window and looked down to the courtyard where David was chatting to Carrie. She also noticed Sally link arms with Brad, in a proprietary way.

  So engrossed were the four of them in each other, they hadn’t noticed another couple arrive. From David’s earlier description – an older man with a younger woman – Jess knew they were the Chief Justice, Dominic Canning, and his wife Rebekah.

  As soon as he spotted them, David went over, kissed Rebekah on both cheeks, and shook Dominic’s hand.

  From her vantage point, Jess found herself watching Rebekah, who stood rigidly next to her husband. When he put a hand on her back to usher her in, Rebekah shrugged it off and walked away. They’ve had a row, Jess thought.

  The Chief Justice immediately took David aside for a private chat, but Jess’s attention went back to Rebekah, who stood aloof from everyone. She was a beautiful woman, tall and slim, with flowing dark hair. Jess could see what had attracted the Chief Justice to Rebekah, but what was in it for her? Money? Status? Jess knew she was being cynical, but that was the reality of life.

  Seeing Rebekah on her own, Brad immediately uncoupled himself from Sally’s grip and went over to talk to her.

  Jess had to admit Brad was attentive and charming. He seemed to get on with everyone, even Big Shot at the airport, whom Jess now knew was the incoming Immigration Minister Roger Pearson. What had Brad and the Minister been talking about so intently in that tiny departure lounge, she wondered?

  Pearson? There was something familiar about that surname. She’d heard it somewhere else today.

  Of course! She went over to her handbag and fished out a newspaper article she’d torn out of the Miami Post on the plane over, thinking it would be big news in a small community like this. Unfolding it, she read again:

  CARIBBEAN NEWS, 17 AUGUST

  AP

  TURKS AND CAICOS MINISTER

  COMMITS SUICIDE

  Newspaper reports in the Turks and Caicos Islands say that local Immigration Minister Clement Pearson was found hanged in his garage early on Tuesday 4 August. Mrs Pearson retired early on Monday evening, leaving her husband working in his study. When she woke up the next morning and saw he hadn’t been to bed all night, she searched and found him in the garage. She called the paramedics, but he couldn’t be revived.

  Government sources said the Minister had been suffering from depression after the death of his 20 year old son from a drugs overdose. Earlier that day, the Minister had been giving evidence to the British Government Inquiry into illegal immigration into the Turks and Caicos, and the sinking of two Haitian sloops off Grand Turk in recent months. Speculation is increasing that the pressure of the Inquiry added to the Minister’s fragile state of mind.

  Today a pathologist gave the provisional cause of the Minister’s death as hanging, with the police treating it as non-suspicious.

  So, Big Shot Roger Pearson had just been appointed Immigration Minister, in place of the deceased Immigration Minister Clement Pearson. Did that mean the two men were related? Things couldn’t work like that in a British Overseas Territory, could they? She felt frustrated. She should be going through everything with David in the office before he left in the morning, not having dinner with a bunch of strangers.

  She put the cutting back in her bag and returned to the window. She frowned as she watched the guests below. They all knew each other very well, but the atmosphere down there seemed awkward – strained, even. Of course the Governor’s accident would be enough to dampen any gathering. Was that the reason for the tension? Only Brad seemed relaxed enough to move easily amongst everyone. But there was one person missing – his brother Charles still hadn’t arrived.

  At that moment Brad looked up, as if aware she was watching him. He smiled and beckoned her down.

  Jess nodded and took a deep breath. She had the feeling this was going to be a long evening.

  6

  Miami

  Detective Inspector Tom Sangster put his bare feet up on the hotel balcony railings, and took a swig of cold lager. Travelling on planes gave him a real thirst. He relaxed back in the chair to breathe in the humid Miami night. August was the hottest month of the year, according to the blurb on the plane. Not that it bothered him. He was used to those temperatures back home in Australia.

  He closed his eyes to let the atmosphere wash over him. The sounds and smells of a new place were always exciting, and Miami didn’t disappoint. On the pavement below, people chatted happily as they strolled along. The rhythmic beat of drums and flamenco guitar drifted over rooftops from the next street. The music seemed to be pulling them like a magnet. His taxi driver had told him to go out and sample Coconut Grove’s nightlife, it was some of the best in Miami. Now the noisy hubbub was tempting him to do just that, despite the late hour.

  Standing his lager bottle on the balcony floor, Tom returned to his latest portrait sketch. With his graphite pencil, he adjusted the mouth into an open smile. Definitely not the tight mouth of the reserved person he’d drawn the first time he’d met Jessica Turner.

  He’d recognised her immediately at Miami Airport earlier. He rarely forgot a face, especially one he’d sketched. So why hadn’t he gone over straightaway and said hello? He’d been asking himself that all the way to the hotel. Jess obviously hadn’t seen him, and by the time he’d got his act together,
she’d disappeared through a departure gate for some place called Providenciales.

  Where the hell was that anyway?

  He got up and went inside for his iPad. Googling Providenciales, he wasn’t surprised to see it was the capital of a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean called the Turks and Caicos Islands. That made perfect sense. Jess was a British diplomat, after all. Was she working there, he wondered, or just visiting?

  Back on the balcony, he stared at the face he’d recreated from memory and that fleeting glimpse in the airport. Dark memories flooded back from their first meeting in Brisbane. It hadn’t gone well. Jess had been cool, to the point of icy. But, then, he had just bawled her out for traipsing over his crime scene, before finding out she was the British Consul.

  Her soul-less eyes back then had unsettled him, mostly because he hadn’t been able to work her out, and capture them on paper. Later, he understood that frosty exterior was her way of coping with the death of her husband and young daughter in a car crash in Indonesia. He knew Jess hadn’t been in the car with them at the time, and that she somehow blamed herself for their deaths. He didn’t know why, because she never spoke about it. He’d only found out about the crash from the British High Commissioner, who’d told him while they were at the hospital waiting for Jess to come out of surgery after that psychopath shot her.

  Shit – what a case that was! The murder of British businesswoman Ellen Chambers had been the most challenging investigation of his career.

  Jess had been so determined to protect the murder victim’s British sister that she’d ended up taking a bullet herself. The woman had guts, no doubt about that. She’d flushed out the killer, even acted as bait. The irony was he’d been credited with tracking down the killer and saving her life. Sometimes, he wondered if it hadn’t been the other way around.

  Still, that case had given him a national profile. An offer of a transfer to the Canberra Federal Police soon followed. That had surprised him. He thought he’d be policing the streets of Brisbane forever. In Canberra, he’d been assigned to an intelligence unit responsible for identifying criminals smuggling illegal migrants to Australia by sea. He never expected to be involved in intelligence work, and found it stimulating. But it was a far cry from what he was used to on the front line.

  Anyway, he must have been doing something right because, in no time, he’d been selected to join the Prime Minister’s new multi-agency task force to combat illegal people smuggling to Australia.

  Funny where life takes you, he thought, as he took another swig of lager. Now here he was, on this humid night in Miami, on a fact-finding mission with a colleague, to see how the Americans coped with illegal boat people from Haiti and Latin America. They’d already visited Italy and Greece to see how those Governments were dealing with people-smuggling from the Middle East, and Africa. They’d been in Paris and London too, examining the problem of migrants trying to get across the Channel by boats or through the tunnel.

  The bleep of an email arriving on his iPad caught his attention.

  Dear Detective Inspector Sangster,

  Welcome to Miami.

  I write to confirm we have arranged a two-day program for you and your colleague with our Miami Air & Marine Branch. A car will pick you up from your hotel at 1000 in the morning for a day of roundtable talks with experts at HQ.

  On day two, air enforcement agents will take you out in our Eurocopter AS35083 AStar, which patrols the Florida waters and a large part of the Caribbean. It provides the backbone of our marine interceptor fleet that protects the south-east US maritime border from smugglers and terrorists.

  I hope you have a useful and informative visit, and I look forward to meeting you at tomorrow’s roundtable talks.

  Bill Shorten

  US Customs and Border Protection, Miami

  Tom sent a cordial reply back, and put his iPad down on the table. He could relax now their programme was in place. He leant back and closed his eyes again, but he wasn’t sleepy. The flight from London had taken the best part of ten hours, and his body clock was still somewhere over the Atlantic.

  Tapping his foot to the music, he could smell food on the breeze now. He was hungry again.

  A text sounded from his mobile. It was from his colleague, in a room just down the corridor.

  You still up, mate? Jetlag’s killing me. Fancy a beer at the Tango Café on the corner?

  Tom smiled and looked at his watch. Almost midnight. But he knew he wouldn’t sleep much tonight anyway.

  See you in the lobby in 10 minutes, he texted back.

  Before he went to change, he picked up his iPad again and opened his contacts’ list. He never deleted anyone unless he knew they were dead.

  Yes, there she was – Jessica Turner. They hadn’t been in touch since Brisbane, and he only had her old Canberra British High Commission address and phone number listed. But he also had a generic FCO email address for her. Hopefully she could pick up her email for that account wherever she was, even in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He’d give it a go.

  7

  Back at the Governor’s Residence, Sally was doing her best to make sure the evening wouldn’t be boring. She’d been diligent in topping up everyone’s wine glasses, especially her own, and keeping up a stream of inane chatter.

  David kept glancing nervously at her.

  “Honestly!” Rebekah Canning gave a dismissive laugh. “If you believe that Sally, you’ll believe anything.”

  Sally’s eyes narrowed. “I’m telling you, Captain Jack Sparrow was based on a pirate from the Bahamas. He plundered ships around these islands and buried the booty on Provo’s Grace Bay Beach.”

  “Huh! You’re showing your gullibility, along with your…” Rebekah cast her eyes over Sally’s ample cleavage.

  Sally sat bolt upright. “And you’re showing you know nothing about the country you live in.”

  Rebekah’s eyes flashed.

  Sensing trouble, Jess intervened. “Well, I wouldn’t mind finding Johnny Depp on the beach when I get up in the morning.”

  Everyone laughed and relaxed back in their chairs, except for Sally who continued to glare at Rebekah.

  Tension eased, Jess reached over and moved the wine bottle well out of Sally’s reach. Now she knew why David wanted them to keep an eye on her. Sally was like a powder keg ready to blow.

  Jess shifted in her chair as perspiration trickled down her back. Her feet and ankles were itching like mad from mozzie bites. So were the backs of her arms. They were biting through her clothes.

  “Try Charles again,” Rebekah said to Brad.

  “I’ve tried loads of times. He’s not answering.” Brad shook his head. “It’s not like my brother to be late, especially if there’s good food and wine around.”

  “Are you sure he got back from his dive okay?” Rebekah’s voice was tense. “He’s not still out there, is he?”

  “No.” Carrie broke off from talking to David. “I saw Charles driving away from the Dive Centre this afternoon, on my way back from taking the kids to church.”

  Carrie had one of those soft American accents that flowed effortlessly, not at all guttural or harsh. In the soft glow of candlelight, with her sun-burnished skin and bright blonde hair, she looked radiant. Jess could quite see why David was smitten.

  “Will you go and look for him, Brad,” Rebekah asked.

  “No.” Sally put her hand on Brad’s arm. “Your brother can look after himself. He’s probably just fallen asleep.”

  Brad nodded. “He’s not used to all that physical activity, working in a New York bank.”

  Sally smiled. “Maybe he’s engaged in some physical activity now, with some woman?”

  Jess noticed Rebekah flinch. The woman seemed to wear her heart on her sleeve. With her long, dark hair and beautiful face, Jess wondered if there was some Spanish or South American heritage in her. She certainly seemed on tenterhooks tonight, especially about Charles. Friendly concern? Or something more?

  Ma
ggie popped her head out of the kitchen door. “Can I serve the main course?” she asked David.

  “Of course.”

  Moments later, Maggie came out proudly carrying a tray of steaming bowls. “Conch stew,” she announced.

  Rebekah groaned, and Maggie’s face fell.

  “Wonderful, Maggie,” Sally said, loudly. “I love your conch stew.”

  Maggie’s smile returned as she placed a bowl in front of each guest.

  Jess was surprised at Rebekah’s rudeness, and glanced at the Chief Justice who stared at his wife with a stony expression, but said nothing. Jess turned to Brad, who sat on her left. “What exactly is conch?” she asked.

  “A massive pink snail.” He smiled and pointed to the bar. “See those huge, shiny sea-shells decorating the shelves. They’re conch shells. The islanders cook the conch’s edible muscle in soups and stews. It’s a local delicacy.”

  Rebekah wrinkled her nose. “They drag themselves along the seabed with that muscly foot. Just imagine what it’s gone through.”

  Dominic gave his wife another warning look. He seemed to know she was ready to blow up too.

  Jess noticed that, despite sitting on either side of Charles’s empty chair, the Cannings had not spoken a word to each other all evening. “Shall we remove Charles’s place setting?” she asked.

  “No,” Rebekah said, quickly. “He’ll be here.”

  Jess shrugged, and dipped her spoon into the stew. After tasting it, she looked over at Maggie, who was hovering by the kitchen door. “Lovely,” she said.

  Maggie nodded gratefully, and went inside.

  Jess turned back to Dominic, who sat on her right. Despite his unremarkable appearance – short, grey hair and a middle aged paunch, she found him knowledgeable on a wide range of issues as she would expect a senior barrister and judge to be. He had a razor sharp brain, giving quick, succinct answers to her questions about the Territory. In just 15 minutes of conversation, she’d learnt more about the Turks and Caicos Islands from him than from the whole of her London brief.

  The other noticeable thing about the Chief Justice was his observant grey eyes. They darted around the table, watching everyone, especially his wife who was now matching Sally in the amount of wine she was drinking. It was only when Jess asked Dominic about Clement Pearson’s death that he became evasive. But she was determined to probe. “I saw an article in the Miami Post on the plane over today about Clement,” she said.