‘What the hell’s he got there?’ Connell demanded. ‘Bunting? Fairy lights?’
The guests were standing now too. After Yves’s outburst, I suppose, any diversion had been welcome. I saw the crewman walk quickly away. Henson’s eyes were the sharpest. Her exclamation was one of outrage.
‘Oh no!’
Then, I saw. For a swaying-about, fumbling drunk, the man in the bows was suddenly displaying remarkable dexterity. In the space of a few seconds he had lighted from a single match no less than three strings of Chinese jumping crackers and had them bursting simultaneously all over the deck around him. What’s more, he wasn’t even bothering to watch them. He was already rummaging in the box for fresh delights.
I could sympathize with Henson’s cry of protest. I remember thinking to myself as he lighted the first string that the motor cruiser had to be a chartered one with a bad crew easily bribed. No one who owned or had any other normal concern for such a boat would have allowed a good deck to be scarred in that way. Decks are sacred, and expensive surfaces. The Italian banker had kept sets of overshoes for guests ignorant or oafish enough to come on board wearing leather soles, and smokers on deck had always been required to carry ash-trays.
‘Paul!’ It was Melanie.
‘Telephone,’ she said. ‘An old friend. And I think it’s long distance.’
‘On which line?’
‘The listed number.’
To Krom I said: ‘If you want to hear this conversation with Mat Williamson, there’s an extension in the entrance hall. Melanie will show you where.’
I didn’t wait to see if he accepted the offer. As I turned away, though, a sudden glow from the sea made me look back.
The vandal on the boat had lighted a Roman candle. As he held it aloft, balls of red fire were spurting up and falling to the deck all around him. His friends began to applaud.
I went up the stairs slowly. Mat would wait and I didn’t want to seem even a little breathless when I took his call. After starting the recorder, I waited an extra moment or two before picking up the phone, and then began to speak immediately as if I had just snatched it up.
‘Mat? What a pleasant surprise!’
I tried to make my surprise, if not my pleasure, sound genuine, but of course he wasn’t fooled.
‘Sorry to take you away from the fireworks, Paul, but this is by way of being an emergency. Besides, I’m returning your call to me this morning.’
I had to think very quickly then. He was using the high pitched, nasal voice of one of the English missionaries who had taught at the school in Fiji. I had heard it first when he had told me about Placid Island. It was his anti-imperialist voice, and also the one he sometimes used to make the saying of a highly unpleasant thing seem as if it were funny. He was probably using it now, partly anyway, as a disguise, but it startled me and I knew that I would have to watch myself. I ought not have been startled by an English Birmingham accent. With the recorder going, though, it couldn’t be allowed to pass without comment.
‘What a strange voice you have, Grandma!’
It was a mistake. He came back promptly, sketching in, for the record, a portrait of the faithful henchman driven at last by mockery into a small loss of temper. ‘I said I was sorry to spoil your fireworks, Paul, and I’m sorry to disturb you when you have so much on your plate already, but this isn’t a bedtime story.’
‘That’s twice you’ve mentioned fireworks, Mat. Where are you? Along the road somewhere? Watching the fireworks too?’
‘You know where I am, Paul. There are always fireworks along the coast there on the Fourteenth of July. If I’m a bit upset, that’s because I’ve been speaking to Frank, so bear with me. I’ve also listened to your conversation with him earlier, and. . Paul? Are you still there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Paul, what Frank said to you this morning was one long lie.’
‘You mean one continuous lie or a lot of separate lies strung together?’
‘I am not joking, Paul. From understandable motives, possibly, but with absolutely no authority from me, Frank has made a dangerous bloody fool of himself. In trying to be helpful by running interference for you, he’s done a number of things he ought not have done. He’s tried to be clever and only succeeded in being horribly stupid. As he’s my responsibility, the first thing I want to do is apologize.’
‘Apology accepted,’ I tried to throw him. So far, every word he’d uttered had been that of a loyal lieutenant addressing a capricious martinet. I tried to throw him by suddenly becoming a martinet, and by speaking to him in a way that he hadn’t been spoken to. I was sure, for a long time, if ever. ‘But,’ I snarled, ‘you said that apologizing was the first thing you wanted to do. How about the second and third? Or have you been sitting around on your black butt waiting for somebody else to do your thinking for you?’
He seemed not to have heard what I’d said. All he did was move calmly into his second-stage position. ‘Paul, do you remember that time some years ago when we — you, that is — were thinking of buying into that Malay-Chinese rubber syndicate? We went to stay with those people up near Kedah.’
‘No, I don’t remember that at all and I’ve never been to Kedah.’
‘Near Kedah, I said. You’ll remember when I tell you. It was just after that American went for a wall; in the jungle and disappeared. The American who’d built up that silk business in Thailand and was taking a vacation in Malaysia? Staying as a house-guest with friends? Remember now, Paul?’
‘How about getting to the point?’
‘But that is the point, that he disappeared and was certainly killed. The local theory was that after he told his friends that he was going for a wall; he was accidentally killed, not because he wasn’t used to the jungles — in fact he was very much at home in them — but because he fell into a tiger trap the village people had dug there on the path he took. It wasn’t the villagers’ fault, of course, but they were scared because he was an American and it was they who’d dug the trap and planted the bamboo spikes. So they buried the body and didn’t report it. That’s why our friends didn’t want us to go for any walks outside the compound while we were their guests. Our disappearance would have meant police enquiries, trouble. Besides, I think they liked us. I think they wanted our money, but I don’t think they wanted us killing ourselves on their doorsteps.’
‘Any more than you want me impaling myself on the bamboo stakes that Frank’s been so busily sharpening? That’s nice, Mat. I’m glad to know. Where’s Frank staying down here?’
‘It’s not nice for anyone, Paul. And I’m including your guests. I don’t know why. If anything should accidentally go wrong in spite of all you’ve done to protect them, they have to be the guilty parties. I hear through the grapevine, by the way, that two of them at least have intelligence links. I’ve asked friends about the Brit and they confirm. There’s nothing nice about any of it. Oh, I agree with you, that doesn’t excuse Frank. He’s made a prize idiot of himself. These people he used your private files to learn about and contact, these old acquaintances of yours, were never the simple-minded hayseeds he wanted them to be. He knows that now and he’s not staying in any one place. He’s buzzing about like crazy, because he also knows now that trying to win medals by relieving you of an unwanted presence was never a good idea anyway. Not without consultation. I’ve told him. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get the chop. But let’s be realistic, Paul. The fact that he knows all this, and that he’s doing his damnedest to put things right, doesn’t help with the immediate problem. Calling off the kind of people he’s had out digging traps for you isn’t as easy as setting them on.’