Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  I had never noticed the island before, despite its most noticeable name. It was a very small island, a mere speck that lay some twenty miles south-east from Wavebreaker’s present position, and that was exactly the direction from which the currents and wind would drive a derelict boat.

  I fetched the pilot book and looked up Murder Cay, but found no listing for the grimly named island. “Try Sister Island,” Ellen suggested laconically.

  It seemed a perverse suggestion, but Ellen’s perversity was often justified, so I duly looked up Sister Island and discovered that was the new name for Murder Cay. The Pilot Book offered no explanation for that change of name, which seemed a deal of trouble for what must be one of the smallest inhabited islands in all the Bahamas. Sister Island was only three miles long and was never more than a half-mile wide. The island’s southernmost promontory was marked with a white light which was meant to flash three times every fifteen seconds and be visible up to five miles away, but the book ominously reported that the light was ‘unreliable’. The whole island was surrounded by coral reefs called the Devil’s Necklace, and I wondered what unfortunate sailor had given the island and its reefs their macabre names. The deep-water access to Murder Cay lay through a dog-legged and unbuoyed passage to the west of the island. The best guide to the deep-water approach seemed to be a tall skeleton radio mast that was conveniently opposite the passage entrance and was supposedly marked with red air-warning beacons. There was an airstrip on the island which should have displayed a flashing green and white light, but, like the white light and the air-warning beacons, the green and white light was also said to be unreliable. The eastern part of the lagoon evidently offered good shelter, but the pilot book noted that the island had no facilities for visiting yachts. In other words, mariners were being warned to keep away from Murder Cay, yet the pencil line on Hirondelle’s chart led inexorably to that island, and there it had ended.

  “The government decided the old name was bad for the tourist business,” Ellen remarked in an odd sort of voice, almost as if she was trying to reassert a commonplace normality over the sinister implications of that line on an abandoned chart.

  “Perhaps the islanders shot the crew,” I said, but in a voice that carried no conviction for, despite the missing crew and the all-too-present cartridges, I really could not believe that murder had been done on Murder Cay. I did not want to believe in murder. I wanted the boat’s fate, like I wanted life, to be explicable without causing me astonishment. I had been brought up in a house that specialised in giving astonishment, which was why I had run away from home to become a Royal Marine. The Marines had toughened me, and taught me to swear and fight and screw and drink, but they had not taught me cynicism, nor had they obliterated the innocent hope for innocent explanations. “Perhaps,” I amended my previous supposition, “it’s just an accident.”

  “Whatever happened,” Ellen said brusquely, “it’s none of our business.”

  “And Mr Mclllwanney varned us to stay avay from the island!” Thessy said.

  I remembered no such warning, but Thessy went to the shelves under the chart table and found one of Mclllvanney’s green sheets of paper. I hardly ever read Mclllvanney’s self-styled Notices to Mariners, and I had clearly overlooked this warning that was brief and to the point. ‘You will stay away from Sister Island. The Royal Bahamian Defence Forces have issued a warning that the island’s new owners don’t like trespass, and I don’t want to lose any boats to that dislike, so ALL Cutwater Charter Boats will henceforth keep AT LEAST five nautical miles from Sister Island until further notice.’

  I thought of the bullet holes that had shattered Hirondelle’s once elegant hull. “Those poor bastards,” I said softly.

  “It’s not our business, Nick,” Ellen said in warning.

  I looked again at McIllvanney’s notice. “Do you think the island’s new owners are mixed up in drugs?” I asked.

  Ellen sighed. She is much given to long-suffering sighs which are her way of informing the male part of the world that it is ineradicably dim-witted. “Do you think they smuggle auto-parts, Nick? Or lavatory paper? Of course they’re into drugs, you airhead. And that is why it is not our business.”

  “I never said it was our business,” I spoke defensively.

  “So throw those cartridges overboard and lose that chart,” Ellen advised me very curtly.

  “The police should see them,” I insisted.

  “You are a fool, Nicholas Breakspear,” Ellen said, but not in an unkind manner.

  “I’ve already advised the Defence Forces that the police should look at the boat,” I said.

  Ellen gave another of her long-suffering sighs. “The dragons won, Nick, and the knights errant lost. Don’t you know that? You’ve delivered the message, so now forget it! No chart. No cartridges. It’s over. No heroics!”

  She meant well, but I could not forget Hirondelle, because something evil had stirred in this paradise of beaches and lagoons and palm-covered islands, and I wanted the authorities to take the damp torn chart and to find just what lay at the end of its carefully pencilled line. So I shrugged off Ellen’s cynical and doubtless sensible pleading, and went topsides to take the helm. Wavebreaker’s wake lay white and straight across a brilliant sunlit sea on which, far to our west, I could see a string of grey warships that were American naval vessels come to the Bahamas for an exercise called Stingray. The sight of the flotilla reminded me of my time in the Royal Marines, and I felt a rueful envy of the American Marines who had this tropical playground with its warm seas and palm trees for their training. I had learned the killing trade under the bitter flail of Norwegian sleet and Scottish snow, but that was all in my past, and now I was a free man and I had just one more charter to skipper, after which I could mend my own boat and sail her on new paths across old oceans.

  Just as Hirondelle had sailed to her adventure.

  But, in its place, had found a coral scrap of land called Murder Cay. And there died.

  We docked at midday. The deserted boatyard was swimming in heat. It was well into the charter business’s low season, so the vast majority of Cutwater’s yachts had either gone north for the summer or were sitting on jackstands out of the water. A couple of our bareboat yachts were still at sea, and Wavebreaker had one more paying charter to complete, but otherwise McIllvanney’s yard had the torpor of tropical summer about it. Even Stella, McIllvanney’s long-suffering secretary, had taken the day off, leaving the office locked, which meant I had to walk into town to find a public telephone from which I called the Bahamian Police and told them about Hirondelle, and added that I had rescued a chart and a handful of cartridges from the stricken boat. The police sounded surprised that I had bothered to call them, and I walked back to the boatyard feeling strangely foolish.

  Ellen laughed at my punctiliousness. Doubtless the police had responded to my call by sharpening their cutlasses and charging their muskets, she mocked, in readiness for an invasion of Murder Cay?

  “I didn’t mention Murder Cay,” I said. “I just told them about the bullet damage to the boat and about the chart.”

  “Well now that you’ve single-handedly won the war on drugs, perhaps you can do something useful, like scrub the deck?” We had only this one day to resupply and prepare Wavebreaker for her last charter, which meant the schooner had to be refuelled and provisioned, her carpets must be vacuumed, her bilges poisoned against rats and cockroaches, her galley made spotless, her deck scrubbed and her brightwork polished.

  In the middle of the afternoon, when it seemed that the work would never be done on time, Bellybutton arrived at the yard. Bellybutton was McIllvanney’s foreman, and for a few seconds I dared hope that he had come to help us, but instead he told me that one of the bareboat thirty-three-footers was in trouble. “The man radioed that his engine broke,” Bellybutton grumbled, “so I have to fetch the idiot in Starkisser.” He was pretending that the errand was a nuisance, though at the same time he was grinning with pleasure at the thoug
ht of taking Mclllvanney’s brand new sportsboat to sea. Starkisser’s midnight-blue hull had metalflake embedded in its fibreglass so that the sleek boat seemed to scintillate with an internal and infernal dark blue light. She had to be one of the fastest production boats in the islands; her twin big-block engines could hurl the three-ton wedge-shaped hull at over eighty miles an hour, and it worried neither McIllvanney nor Bellybutton that at such a speed a man could not hear himself scream and that even the smallest wave shook the bones right out of their flesh.

  “There ain’t a girl in creation who don’t melt after a ride in Starkisser,” Bellybutton liked to boast. His real name was Benjamin, but no one ever called him Benjamin or even Ben. To the whole island he was Bellybutton. It was rumoured he had earned the nickname by biting the navel clean out of a whore who had displeased him, and I found the rumour all too believable for he was not a pleasant man. In fact he was a black version of McIllvanney himself; rangy, knowing, tall and sarcastic. “Mr Mac wants to see you tonight,” Bellybutton leered at me, as though he suspected I would not enjoy the meeting. “He says you’re to go to his place at sundown.”

  “Why isn’t he in the yard today?” I asked.

  “Mr Mac’s taking a day off!” Bellybutton said in an indignant voice, as though my question had impugned McIllvanney’s honour. “He has business to take care of. He had to take a boat to Miami, and that’s why he give me the keys to Starkisser. You maybe want to take Miss Ellen for a ride in Starkisser?” He dangled the sports-boat’s keys enticingly. “I won’t tell Mr Mac, long as you give me a ride on Miss Ellen when you’re done.” He laughed and obscenely pumped his lean hips.

  “You’re an offensive shit, Bellybutton,” I said in a very friendly voice, but he had already turned his attention away from me because a car had suddenly appeared in the yard. It was a long white Lincoln with black-tinted windows. The car slid quietly between the cradled yachts to stop just short of Wavebreaker’s pier. Apart from the crunching sound of the tyres the Lincoln’s approach had been silent and oddly sinister.

  One of the passenger doors opened and a very tall and very black-skinned man climbed slowly into the sunlight. “A friend of yours?” I asked Bellybutton, but his eyes widened, he muttered a curse and, instead of answering, he dashed frantically towards Starkisser’s pontoon.

  The tall black man who had emerged from the Lincoln was dressed in a dark blue three-piece suit that looked incongruously heavy for such a hot day. He wore the elegantly cut suit over a white shirt and an old Etonian tie. He was impressively built; thin hipped and wide shouldered, like a boxer who could punch hard and dance lightly. He looked calmly around the yard, then put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses before slamming the car door shut.

  Bellybutton had thrown off Starkisser’s lines and now let the sportsboat float away from the pontoon as he unclipped her jet-black cockpit cover. Then, plainly frantic to escape the elegant man, he punched the boat’s engines into life. The echo of the twin motors crackled back from the nearby buildings like the sound of a battle-tank firing up for action. Scared pelicans flapped away, and Ellen came up from the galley to see what had caused the commotion. Bellybutton gave one last look at the man walking along the dock, then shoved Starkisser’s tachometers way into their red zones so that the dark blue powerboat stood on her tail and screamed out to sea as though the devil himself was on her tail.

  “A guilty conscience is a terrible thing.” The tall black man chuckled, then sauntered across Wavebreaker’s gangplank. Once on deck he stopped to admire Ellen who was dressed in a brief pair of shorts and a faded tank top. Even with her glorious hair scraped back into a loose bun, and with her hands and face smeared with soap and sweat from the exertions of scrubbing the galley stove, she looked utterly beguiling. The black man momentarily took off his sunglasses as though to examine Ellen more closely and I saw he had very hard and very cynical eyes that were suddenly turned full on me. “You must be Breakspear.”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Deacon Billingsley—” he paused as though I should recognise the name, “and I am a police officer.”

  The arrival of Deacon Billingsley should have given me the satisfaction that my telephone call had been treated seriously, but I sensed this policeman was not going to offer me any satisfaction at all. He had spoken very flatly, making his introduction sound like a threat. The sun, mirrored in the obsidian brightness of his glasses, momentarily dazzled me. “What were you doing when you found Hirondelle, Breakspear?” Billingsley asked me.

  “Making passage.”

  “Making passage.” He mocked my British accent, then turned on Ellen who had stayed on deck to hear the conversation. “Where were you coming from, lady?”

  “Hey! Count me out, OK? I didn’t call any goddamn cavalry. You want to know anything about that boat, you ask Nick, not me.” She twisted contemptuously towards the companionway.

  Billingsley watched her walk away. “She’s American?” He seemed amused rather than offended by Ellen’s defiance.

  “She’s American,” I confirmed.

  Ellen dropped out of sight and Billingsley turned back to me. “Are you screwing the American, Breakspear?” I was so astonished by the sudden question that I just gaped at him. “Are you laying the girl?” Billingsley rephrased his insolent question as though I had not understood the first version. His tone of voice was so bland that he might as well have been asking my opinion of Wavebreaker’s sea-keeping qualities.

  “The answer is no,” I finally said, “and fuck off.”

  Billingsley lit a cigar. It had a red and yellow band on which I could just read the word Cubana. He took his time; first cutting the cigar, then heating its tip with a succession of matches that he carelessly and provocatively dropped on to Wavebreaker’s scrubbed deck. He used the toes of his expensive brogues to grind each dead match into the teakwood so that the charred tips smeared black carbonised streaks across the wood’s bone-whiteness. He finally drew the cigar into red heat and discarded the final match. He raised his eyes to stare into my face, and I felt a surge of fear. It was not Billingsley’s physical size that provoked that fear, for I was of a size with him, nor was it his profession that gave me pause, but rather the aura of incipient violence that he radiated like a blast furnace. “You mess with me, Breakspear,” he said in a deceptively mild voice, “and I’ll rip your spine out of your asshole.”

  I was damned if I would show him my fear. “Do you have a warrant card?” I asked him instead.

  For a second I thought he was going to hit me, but then he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a wallet that he unfolded and thrust towards me, giving me just enough time to see that he held the rank of chief inspector, one of the highest ranks in the Bahamian police force, then the wallet was snapped shut and Deacon Billingsley moved to stand very close to me, so close that I could smell the cigar smoke on his breath. “Where’s the chart you took from Hirondelle?”

  “Down below.”

  “Then fetch it,” he said dismissively.

  I obeyed. The chart had dried into stiff and faded folds, but Billingsley did not look at it, instead he just screwed it up and thrust it into a pocket of his expensive jacket.

  “I also found these,” I said, and offered him the handful of cartridge cases.

  He ignored my outstretched hand. “What were you doing at Sister Island, Breakspear?”

  The question puzzled me for I had not mentioned Sister Island, nor its old name of Murder Cay, to either the police or to the Defence Forces, nor had Billingsley troubled to look at the pencilled line on the chart, yet he had somehow connected Hirondelle with the mysterious island. “I asked you what you were doing at Sister Island,” Deacon Billingsley said threateningly.

  “We weren’t anywhere near the island!” I protested. “You can check that for yourself! I reported the co-ordinates where we found Hirondelle over the radio, and those co-ordinates are twenty miles north-west of Sister Island. That’s as close as we ever g
ot to it.”

  He said nothing for a few seconds, and I sensed that I might have unsettled this policeman. I had also angered him, though his anger seemed directed at himself. He had come here on a misunderstanding; believing that Wavebreaker had been at Murder Cay when in fact we had not even been within sight of that mysterious island.

  But Billingsley had clearly known about Hirondelle’s visit to Murder Cay, and I realised that this senior police officer had not come here to enquire into a crime, but to cover it up. Hirondelle’s owners, he said glibly, had decided to fly home and, despairing of ever selling the yacht in a glutted market, had simply abandoned it and someone had evidently used the hulk for target practice. “Maybe it was the Americans,” Billingsley suggested airily, “you know there’s a naval exercise in progress? Perhaps they machine-gunned the hulk?”

  “Those cartridge cases aren’t American issue,” I said, holding out the green-lacquered steel casings. I should have kept my silence, for the only purpose my words served was to demonstrate my disbelief in Billingsley’s outrageous explanation.

  That disbelief was a challenge, and Deacon Billingsley was not a man to resist a challenge. He tipped my hand with his own strong grasp, spilling the cartridge cases into his left palm, then, one by one, he tossed the cartridge cases overboard. “You have a boat in the Bahamas.” It was not a question, but a flat statement. “A ketch called Masquerade, presently marooned on Straker’s Cay.”