The bodyguard-chauffeur finished one of his mostly invisible circuits and stopped in the roadway by Darcy’s gates, directly opposite my own patch of concealment. In the deep starlight he leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette, and there he stayed on watch, without alarm of any sort, the sweet smell of burning tobacco drifting across as the evening’s sole entertainment.
He and I both waited two and a half hours for Michael and Amy to reappear. The chauffeur came to life with ease to open rear car doors and drive away, and I, still pinned with stiff muscles, was about to cross the road to where Robin stood in his doorway looking at his guests’ departing car when Evelyn, appearing behind him, put her hand persuasively on his shoulder and drew him into the house.
The inside lights went off progressively until they shone only in their owners’ bedroom, and I saw no likelihood that night of getting Robin on his own. Evelyn was a complication and a nuisance.
Thanks to her I’d wasted a long time learning the leaf-shapes of enveloping Florida bushes, and thought them a poor exchange for the rear end registration number of the visitors’ car, which showed its home state unsurprisingly to be Florida. To Michael and Amy, I learned later, the Cayman Island house was a weekend cottage. An equally grand house north of Miami was home.
My rental car, collected from outside the cinema, had been too far away for me to be able to follow Michael and Amy if I’d tried, but it was Robin alone I wanted. I hadn’t known Michael and Amy wouldn’t be in their house on Grand Cayman, and they weren’t anywhere in sight when I returned to the middling motel one road back from the beach that had seemed to me a faceless place to stay.
In the frugal but reasonably comfortable room I wrote a long letter to Jett, telling her on paper all the loving things I found it difficult to say to her face. My dear grandmother might warn her that I’d loved and left three times in the past, but Jett was different... and how did one define ‘different’? except that anyone who could love Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X was as different as Pu-239.
The television in my room predicted a short life for tropical storm Sheila, now located over open water at 16 degrees North, 79 degrees West and still travelling north-west at 10 miles an hour. A map was screened briefly, with a storm-warning issued for a place called Rosalind Bank.
By morning it was raining on poor old Rosalind Bank, but tropical storm Sheila, although now circling with 60 mph winds, showed few serious signs of organisation and was travelling north.
Tropical storm Sheila, I mentally calculated, was about six hundred miles due south of Sand Dollar Beach. If she went on travelling due north (very unlikely), she would hit the Darcy house in roughly sixty hours, or nine o’clock in the evening on Thursday, two and a half days ahead.
Tropical storm Sheila perversely then wriggled round to north-west again and, speeding up, earned Hurricane status, Category 1.
Apart from swimming in the still blue and tranquil Atlantic I spent a good part of the day filling hours as profitably as possible by buying and making revealing lists from a detailed Florida racing form newspaper. I sent a copy of my labours to Kensington by courier and then spent time repacking both clothes and mind, and used some of the hours left talking to Will on the phone at the Miami Hurricane Center (Sheila strengthening nicely) and to Unwin to thank him for the camera.
Unwin had an answering service that said he was out, but at my third try he lifted his receiver and after surprised hellos said he was real pleased to hear I’d got pictures out of that little mud-bucket.
I asked him about Amy’s day on Trox and learned some new four-letter profanities. Never again, Unwin said, would he fly that woman anywhere. And yes, he agreed, she had had the safe open and shut again, and wouldn’t let anyone else near it.
He listened carefully to what I suggested, and after he’d thoroughly sucked his long yellow teeth and considered things he said there would be no difficulty, and he would call me back.
It was much later than I’d intended to be still at the motel when he at length came on the line, but the delay had been worth it. Tomorrow was all fixed. He’d completed the paperwork.
‘Sleep well, Perry,’ he said.
I drove and walked to the same place as the evening before, and at Robin Darcy’s house pressed the bell.
This time, as if he’d been waiting there, Robin Darcy opened the heavy door himself immediately, and stood there unmoving, the light from inside shining on his back making his whole body immobile in silhouette.
He looked, not exactly deadly, but most definitely a threat.
From his point of view he saw, lit from in front against darkness beyond, a man taller than he, and younger and thinner and certainly with better eyesight, but one with only a fraction of the knowledge and experience he needed.
Darcy didn’t ask me in; He said, ‘Whesre are George Loricroft’s letters?’
I replied flatly, ‘Germany.’
‘For whose benefit?’
‘If you don’t know,’ I said, ‘I’ll go home.’
A triumphant voice of West Berkshire origin grated suddenly and loudly behind me, ‘You’re going nowhere, mate. And this bit of hardware jamming into your kidneys, this is no toy, it makes holes in silly boys.’
I said lightly to Robin Darcy, ‘Do you have an endless supply of these things?’ and I saw the flash behind the glasses that perhaps meant a warning. In any case he turned on his heel, jerked his head at me to follow, and walked silently in felt slippers across the marble and into the distant sitting-room.
I didn’t need to be told that it was Michael Ford’s shoes squeaking behind me, nor that it was Amy’s sandals tip-tapping away beside him in an echo of Glenda Loricroft’s high-heeled boots.
‘Stop there and turn round,’ Michael ordered, and the brief view I had of anxiety on Darcy’s face, as I did what I was told, reminded me unsettlingly of alligators.
Michael wore khaki-coloured knee-length shorts with a white short-sleeved top that purposefully revealed his weight-trained biceps. The slight bow to his legs gave, as before, the impression that his muscular shoulders were too heavy for his knees, and his thick neck left no doubt that, in general, opposing his strength was futile.
Amy, her small-boned pared-down little face smiling with satisfaction, clearly thought me a total fool to have walked into such a simple ambush. She too, in fawn trousers and similar white shirt to Michael’s, carried also a lookalike gun.
Ignoring the gun as if it were invisible I said to her with gushing pleasure, ‘Hello, Amy, how lovely to see you! It seems so long since I stayed with you the night I was rescued from Trox Island.’
I meant what I said as simply a way towards sheathing the swords, so to speak, but Amy frowned and snapped back very sharply, ‘You were never,’ she said, ‘on Trox Island.’ Into my obvious amazement, she said, ‘Trox Island is mine, and no one has any claim to anything on it since Hurricane Odin. I repeat, you were NEVER there. You must have been saved from some other island. You have got them mixed up.’
Michael nodded in agreement with watchful eyes, and said, ‘Everything on Trox Island is Amy’s. If you have never been there, which of course you have not, you cannot claim it or anything on it.’
‘Kris...’ I began.
‘Your friend Kris agrees he never went there either.’
My friend Unwin might tell it differently, I thought, and put Trox for the while on hold. The immediate present needed more like an intensive care unit, emergency room treatment. I still wanted to get Darcy alone.
Michael, Amy and Robin Darcy, I thought in clarification: three were active Traders, active middlemen. Then there were three more, at least, in their group. There was Evelyn, and the one who had done bodyguard duty the evening before, patient and loyal and carrying a gun. A sixth was perhaps the pilot who had flown the Downsouth rental aircraft that I had ridden in blindfold.