She smiled thinly. ‘I didn’t want to disturb your dinner.’
‘Had that. Believe me, with just my iPad for company it didn’t take very long.’
‘The restaurant’s supposed to be very nice.’
‘It is. I suppose.’
‘Albeit very expensive.’
‘Yes it is. Still, it’s an expensive mail service you’re running here at sixty bucks for the ferry trip.’
‘Actually it didn’t cost me anything because I said I’d be coming straight back. I wanted to make absolutely sure that got into your hands tonight.’
‘Well now that you’re here, why not stay for drink?’
We went into the bar where I ordered some wine. ‘Thank God you came,’ I said. ‘Now I can justify ordering something good. It never seems worth it when you’re on your own.’
‘I know that feeling.’
‘You live alone?’
‘Divorced. Husband’s a lawyer, too. Which isn’t a good recipe for matrimonial harmony.’
‘I think it beats marrying a footballer. I was never a good husband.’
‘That’s a fairly common mistake.’
‘What’s this?’ I asked staring at the envelope.
‘An air ticket, to Pointe-à-Pitre.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Guadeloupe.’
‘Is that where I’m going?’
‘First thing tomorrow morning. We both are. I felt I should accompany you. As a sign of my good faith. To help you find Jérôme Dumas. Besides, it’s a short flight and I thought you might need someone along who speaks French and Creole.’
‘And is this on the say-so of someone in the local nick? Your secret client perhaps.’
‘So, it seems that you do have a good nose after all.’
‘I like to know who I’m dealing with. Especially when it turns out to be a criminal.’
‘I didn’t know you were so particular,’ said Grace. ‘Given your own penal history.’
‘Is that on Wikipedia, too?’
‘Yes. It is. You’ve had an interesting life, Mr Manson.’
‘Scott. If we’re going to be travelling together we should call each other by our first names, don’t you think?’
‘You are going then? To Pointe-à-Pitre?’
‘I don’t think I have much choice. Right now, yours is the only game in town. So I may as well play along. Three points would be nice, but I’ll settle for a no-score-draw. Finding out just where he is right now would be almost as good as meeting him in person.’
‘Have you met him before?’
‘No.’
‘So why did they send you and not someone he knows?’
‘I might be wrong about this but the people he’s met already aren’t too impressed with him. In fact, not knowing him might actually be an advantage.’
‘Is that why PSG loaned him to Barcelona?’
‘Probably.’
‘Was he in any kind of trouble?’
‘In Paris? Yes, he might have been. I’m not sure.’
The waiter arrived with the wine; I sniffed it carefully and then nodded at him to pour.
I clinked glasses with Grace affably; she tasted the wine and added her appreciation.
‘Incidentally,’ she said, ‘it’s worth mentioning that while my client may be in prison at the moment, that doesn’t make him a criminal. Actually, he’s on remand. That means he’s innocent until proved guilty. Although to be quite frank with you that’s the part of English justice that continues to elude me. You arrest a man, charge him, throw him in prison for months and months, and only then do you bring him to trial. Some of my clients have been waiting to come to trial for more than a year. That might be permissible in England where the prisons have to conform to European standards, but here, on Antigua, it’s nothing short of a disgrace.’
‘Believe me, Wandsworth nick isn’t Jumby Bay. And it’s eighteen months of my life I won’t ever get back. Especially as those eighteen months might have been the best I’ll ever know. I was playing for Arsenal when it happened and it doesn’t get much better than that. Not for me.’
‘I’d have thought management could be a lot of fun.’
‘There’s nothing that’s as much fun as playing. Take my word for it. And it’s best you do. That way I can spare you a lot of the clichés about football. I tend to suffer from those the way normal people have dandruff.’
‘I’ll certainly let you know if I get bored in that way. I’m the female equivalent of Head n’ Shoulders.’
I opened the envelope and found an open return ticket to Guadeloupe. But that was all there was in the envelope. ‘What, no suggestions for where to look? No addresses? No names? I thought that was the deal. Unless he’s hiding at the airport.’
‘I wish he was.’
Grace tapped her head and as she lifted her arm I caught a strong scent of her perfume, which did little to dissuade me from finding her attractive.
‘They’re all in here. Oh, don’t worry, Scott, this little magical mystery tour won’t take us long. Guadeloupe isn’t very big. And it’s a dump, too. Frankly, the less time we have to spend there the better. The airport is the best thing on the island. That’s not a joke. If Guadeloupe was half as nice as Antigua the British wouldn’t have let France have it. There’s certainly nowhere like Jumby Bay on the island. It’s probably the least charming island in the Caribbean and is full of French people who can’t afford to go to St Barts. About the only thing on Guadeloupe which is better is the education system, which ranks among the best in the whole of France.’
‘You know the island well?’
‘I used to go on holiday there, for a while, when I was a child. But originally I’m from Montserrat, which is a little island just south of here. My mother was from Antigua, which is how I came to live here. What about you? What’s your background?’
I told her about my Scots father and my black German mother.
‘That’s quite a mixture,’ she said.
‘I sometimes wonder where the black part of me originated.’ I grinned. ‘I know it’s not Scotland. That’s been pointed out to me more times than I care to remember. The Scots aren’t exactly known for their sensitivity in matters regarding race. Or about anything else, for that matter. But now and again, I’d really like to know where my ancestors came from. Which part of Africa, you know?’
‘You can’t help that when you’re in the Caribbean. It comes with the territory. My great-great-grandfather was white. But whether that means he owned my great-great-grandmother I’m not sure.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not even sure it matters. Not any more. The slavery thing, I mean. When I lived in Birmingham I used to get pretty worked up about things like that, but not now. Life’s too short. And me, I’m such a mixture of races that it would probably take the CERN particle accelerator to separate all of my atoms out and say where they came from.’
‘You got that right.’
‘It’s ironic though. The way rich Europeans bring the descendants of the young black men they used to transport across the Atlantic to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations, to play football in places like Liverpool, Lisbon and Lagos. Those were the centres of the European slave market.’
‘Not just the Caribbean,’ I said. ‘There are plenty coming straight from Africa, too, these days. But it seems especially true of Guadeloupe. Half the French team would seem to hail from Guadeloupe. Why is that, do you think?’
‘I think maybe you’ll have a better idea after you’ve been to the island.’
‘You know, I wish I’d met you when we were in the overlap, at Birmingham University. I might have enjoyed it a bit more.’
‘I bet you did all right with the girls.’
‘I was a pig.’
She smiled patiently. ‘You wouldn’t have liked me. I was always working in the library. Law is rather demanding in that respect.’