“Ah, Chief, this is the Reverend Simon Prince, the local Anglican vicar. He has some interesting information for us.”
Hannah wondered where Parker had got the word Chief from. He hated it. Sir would do nicely. Desmond, later—much later. Maybe.
“Any luck with that second bullet?”
“Er, no—not yet.”
“Better get on with it,” said Hannah. Parker disappeared through the French windows. Hannah closed them.
“Well now, Mr. Prince. What would you like to tell me?”
“It’s Quince,” said the vicar. “Quince. This is all very distressing.”
“It is indeed. Especially for the Governor.”
“Oh, ah, yes. I meant really—well ... my coming to you with information about a fellow of the cloth. I don’t know whether I should, but I felt it might be germane.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” suggested Hannah mildly.
The reverend calmed down and sat.
“It all happened last Friday,” he said. He told the story of the delegation from the Committee for Concerned Citizens and their rebuff by the Governor. When he had finished, Hannah frowned.
“What exactly did Reverend Drake say?” he asked.
“He said,” repeated Quince, “ ‘We have to get rid of that Governor and get ourselves a new one.’ ”
Hannah rose. “Thank you very much, Mr. Quince. May I suggest you say no more about this, but leave it with me?”
After the grateful vicar scuttled out, Hannah thought it over. He did not particularly like stool pigeons, but he would now have to check out the fire-breathing Baptist, Walter Drake, as well.
At that point Jefferson appeared with a tray of cold lobster tails in mayonnaise. Hannah sighed. There were some compensations to being sent four thousand miles from home. And if the Foreign Office was paying ... He poured himself a glass of chilled Chablis and started.
During Hannah’s lunch, Chief Inspector Jones came back from the airport. “No one has left the island,” he told Hannah, “not in the last forty hours.”
“Not legally, at any rate,” said Hannah. “Now, another chore, Mr. Jones. Do you keep a firearms register?”
“Of course.”
“Fine. Would you check it through for me and visit everyone who has a listed firearm on the islands? We are looking for a large-caliber handgun. Particularly a handgun that cannot be produced, or one that has been recently cleaned and gleams with fresh oil.”
“Fresh oil?”
“After being fired,” said Hannah.
“Ah, yes, of course.”
“One last thing, Chief Inspector. Does Reverend Drake have a registered firearm?”
“No. Of that I am certain.”
When he had gone Hannah asked to see Lieutenant Haverstock. “Do you by any chance own a service revolver or automatic?” he asked.
“Oh, I say, look here. You don’t really think ...” expostulated the young subaltern.
“It occurred to me it might have been stolen, or misappropriated and replaced.”
“Ah, yes. See your point, old boy. Actually, no. No gun. Never brought one to the island. Got a ceremonial sword, though.”
“If Sir Marston had been stabbed, I might think of arresting you,” Hannah said mildly. “Any guns in Government House at all?”
“No, not to my knowledge. Anyway, the killer came from outside, surely? Through the garden wall?”
Hannah had examined the wrenched-off lock on the steel gate in the garden wall at first light. From the angles of the two broken hasps and the torn-apart bar of the great padlock, there was a little question that someone had used a long and very strong crowbar to force the old steel to snap like that. But it also occurred to Hannah that the snapping of the lock might have been a ruse. It could have been done hours or even a couple of days earlier. No one had ever tested the gate; it was deemed to be rusted solid.
The killer could have torn off the lock and left the gate in the closed position in advance, then come through the house to kill the Governor and retreat back into the house afterward. What Hannah needed was that second bullet, hopefully intact, and the gun that had fired it. He looked out at the glittering blue sea. If it was down there, he’d never find it.
He rose, wiped his lips, and went out to find Oscar and the Jaguar. It was time he had a word with Reverend Drake.
Sam McCready also sat at lunch. When he entered the open-sided verandah dining room of the Quarter Deck, every table was full. Out on the square, men in bright beach shirts and wraparound dark glasses were positioning a flatbed truck decorated with bunting and daubed with posters from Marcus Johnson. The great man was due to speak at three.
Sam looked around the terrace and saw a single vacant chair. It was at a table that was occupied by one other luncher.
“We’re a bit crowded today. Mind if I join you?” he asked.
Eddie Favaro waved at the chair. “No problem.”
“You here for the fishing?” asked McCready as he studied the brief menu.
“Yep.”
“Odd,” said McCready after ordering Seviche, a dish of raw fish marinated in fresh lime juice. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have said you were a cop.”
He did not mention the long-shot inquiry he had made the previous evening after studying Favaro at the bar—the call to a friend in the Miami office of the FBI—or the answer he had received that morning.
Favaro put down his beer and stared at him. “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “A British bobby?”
McCready waved his hand deprecatingly. “Oh no, nothing so glamorous. Just a civil servant trying to get a peaceful holiday away from the desk.”
“So what’s this about my being a cop?”
“Instinct. You carry yourself like a cop. Would you mind telling me why you’re really here?”
“Why the hell should I?”
“Because,” McCready suggested mildly, “you arrived just before the Governor was shot. And because of this.”
He handed Favaro a sheet of paper. It was on Foreign Office-headed notepaper. It announced that Mr. Frank Dillon was an official of that office and begged “to whom it may concern” to be as helpful as possible.
Favaro handed it back and thought things over. Lieutenant Broderick had made it plain that he was on his own once he entered British territory.
“Officially, I’m on vacation,” Favaro began. “No, I don’t fish. Unofficially, I’m trying to find out why my partner was killed last week, and by whom.”
“Tell me about it,” suggested McCready. “I might be able to help.”
Favaro told him how Julio Gomez had died. The Englishman chewed his raw fish and listened.
“I think he may have seen a man on Sunshine, and been seen himself. A man we used to know in Metro-Dade as Francisco Mendes, alias the Scorpion.”
Eight years earlier, the drug-turf wars had started in South Florida, notably in the Metro-Dade area. Prior to that, the Colombians had shipped cocaine into the area, but the Cuban gangs had distributed it. Then the Colombians had decided they could cut out the Cuban middlemen and sell direct to the users. They began to move in on the Cubans’ territory. The Cubans responded, and the turf wars broke out. The killings had continued ever since.
In the summer of 1984, a motorcyclist in red and white leather, astride a Kawasaki, had drawn up outside a liquor store in the heart of the Dadeland Mall, produced an Uzi submachine carbine from a totebag, and calmly emptied the entire magazine into the busy store. Three people had died, fourteen were injured.
Normally, the killer would have gotten away, but a young motorcycle cop was giving a parking ticket two hundred yards away. When the killer threw down his empty Uzi and sped off, the policeman gave chase, broadcasting the description and direction as he went. Halfway down North Kendall Drive, the man on the Kawasaki slowed, pulled over, drew a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer automatic from his blouse front, took aim, and shot the oncoming policeman in the chest. As the young cop crashed over, the killer rode off at top speed, according to witnesses who gave a good description of the bike and the leather clothing. His helmet hid his face.