Constable MacMahon came to my house on Sunday morning. I was in bed when he knocked and I answered the door in my dressing gown.
“Sorry to wake you, Mr. Rennison. I wonder if we could talk.”
“Now?”
“It’s about Madame Dell.”
More than a talk it turned out, he wanted me to accompany him down to Madame Dell’s house. He was looking for financial records. I didn’t understand why he wanted me to go with him; why could he not simply bring me the relevant papers?
“Not allowed this time,” he said gloomily. “All these fellows coming from across the channel. Cameras and powders. Can’t touch anything. No sir. Very important this time.”
Bankers are respected in the Bahamas — they are at the heart of the tax-exile, tourist, and even contraband economy — and perhaps he thought my presence would lend him added authority.
When we arrived at Madame Dell’s, people were gathered around watching, for never before had there been anything like this in the village. The Roman Catholic service was over — it was held under the tree at the foot of the government dock — and the entire congregation seemed to have come over to watch these official looking men. There was also a group of Haitians, people from the bush whom I had never seen before, as well as some other villagers. Constable MacMahon was rather put out; he was being shown up as a bumpkin; the murders had got the attention he had wanted but this was the price.
“ ’Scuse me, ’scuse me,” he said gruffly, elbowing his way through the little crowd. I followed close behind.
Madame Dell’s house was small and remarkably tidy. I had never been inside before. We entered by the door which faced the harbor and were in the living room. Up a narrow staircase were two little bedrooms and a bathroom jammed under the sloping roof. I watched while Constable MacMahon went through the contents of the table in Madame Dell’s room. There were some letters, mostly written in French, one or two old documents, also in French, and the bank passbook. There was a checkbook but I told Constable MacMahon not to bother with it, for business on the out islands is conducted almost entirely in cash and the checkbook had hardly been used.
Back downstairs, the kitchen was crowded with the police officers who had come in by boat earlier in the morning. The body had been taken over to Marsh Harbour where they had a morgue, but there were dark brown-red stains on the unpainted wood table and on the floor where the men were working. I had not been prepared for that.
“What have you got there?” said one of the police officers, a man dressed incongruously in a tie and jacket.
“The woman’s bankbook,” said Constable MacMahon. “Found it upstairs.”
“Well, put it back there, will you?”
Constable MacMahon looked at me. His cheeks were burning. I told him it didn’t really matter, I had the account number. He left the room muttering and climbed noisily up the stairs. The police officer in the jacket turned to me.
“You know anyone around here who could translate for us,” he said, “French into English?”
“Most of the Haitians speak English,” I said.
“It’s translation of written material that we need,” said the policeman. They were ahead of Constable MacMahon; they knew about the documents upstairs.
“Fellow called Tommas who lives out by Burnett’s place,” I said. “He is an educated man.”
Constable MacMahon returned. We left by the kitchen door. Behind the house there was a steep bank, covered with scruffy vegetation, at the top of which was the back garden of the Majestic Hotel. A cement walk led from the kitchen door around to the front of the house. We made our way back through the little group of onlookers.
“Bastards,” said Constable MacMahon under his breath. He was still fuming about being sent upstairs.
“What about the daughter?” I asked. “Where was she this time?”
“Working at the hotel. I saw her myself. Dropped in at the dart tournament after dinner. They said at the bar she didn’t leave until almost twelve, when Mrs. Rainey met her.”
“She could have slipped out the back, climbed down the bank here, and been back before anyone noticed,” I said. It would have been difficult but not impossible, especially for someone young and agile.
“I suppose it’s possible,” said Constable MacMahon, casting an eye up the hill, “but tell me, Mr. Rennison, why? Why would she do it? And what about the other murder?”
I could think of an answer to neither question.
At Constable MacMahon’s insistence, we went directly to the bank. As with Pierre’s account, I found nothing particularly unusual. The balance was larger than might have been expected, but I had heard that Madame Dell was one of the Haitians who had brought money with her. There were regular small deposits (payment for work done, no doubt), more or less regular small withdrawals, and four or five larger withdrawals. “Probably for laundry supplies,” I said to Constable MacMahon, “and larger purchases of some kind.”
The total balance had declined somewhat over the past few months. Constable MacMahon stared blankly at the upside-down figures for a few moments, grunted, and left the bank without saying a word.
For all their photographs, fingerprint taking, officious scrutiny, tape measuring, and what we later learned was blood type analysis, the police from New Providence did no better than Constable MacMahon at solving the murders. They appeared to accept — or at least caused no one to challenge — the prevailing view on the island: that the first murder was connected with the drug and tourist trade, and the second somehow with voodoo, even though there was not a whisper of evidence for either explanation. They never did come to see me; they never looked at those few columns of figures.
I was on the ferry on my way to the airport for one of my infrequent trips to Miami when I met Tommas, the poet who lived out by Burnett’s place. He was traveling to New Providence for a meeting of a left-wing exile group; unlike most of the Haitians, he was politically active — he loved Haiti and her mysterious culture. Tommas was older than I was — in his late thirties — and he was, I guessed, rather disdainful of my profession. But I had seen some of his poems — they were in English and were published on newsprint-like paper by a little publishing house in St. Lucia, a thousand miles to the south. He had come to see me shortly after I had come to the islands when he heard I too was a writer. I had been a disappointment to him, both because I did not write poetry and because I fell in so easily with the people at the Yacht Club. He didn’t understand that that was part of my business. But we were not unfriendly.
I made some reference to Madame Dell’s daughter. She was no longer required to remain for questioning and was planning to leave the islands. No doubt it was because the money she had been left, although not a lot, would enable her to leave.
“Man, it has nothing to do with the money,” Tommas said. “She had been dishonored.”
I was puzzled. Was he being overly romantic?
“Dishonored?” I said.
Tommas merely shrugged his shoulders.
“Dishonored by the death of her fiancé?” I said.
But he would say no more.
On the plane to Miami I thought about Tommas’s remark. Dishonored: it was a word from an old novel. And from time to time throughout the day, I thought about the look on Madame Dell’s face when I had asked her about Pierre, and about Winnie, telling me the village gossip that Pierre’s murder had something to do with women. She never said it was the tourists.
I flew back to Marsh Harbour late in the afternoon and took a water taxi across the channel to the village. In the evening I walked along the path past Burnett’s place, through the scruffy silvery woods to Tommas’s hut. The barking of a large German shepherd brought him outside. He calmed the dog. I stood there until finally — and without grace — he invited me into the hut.