Death in the Caribbean Read online

  DEATH IN THE

  CARIBBEAN

  J.R.L. ANDERSON

  CONTENTS

  IEarthquake

  IIThe Cavals

  IIINaurataka

  IVThe Chacarima Caves

  VOn the Run

  VIThe Black Notebook

  VIIThe Man in the Cave

  VIIIJourney Underground

  IXI Give Myself Up

  XCat and Mouse

  XIBack in London

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE J.R.L. ANDERSON COLLECTION

  The Peter Blair Mysteries

  Death on the Rocks

  Death in the Thames

  Death in the North Sea

  Death in the Desert

  Death in the Caribbean

  Death in the City

  Death in the Greenhouse

  Death in a High Latitude

  The Piet Deventer Investigations

  A Sprig of Sea Lavender

  Festival

  Late Delivery

  Other J.R.L. Anderson Mysteries

  Reckoning in Ice

  The Nine-Spoked Wheel

  Redundancy Pay

  For Timothy

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wonder what would have happened if a Lady Macbeth had decided to pursue Shakespeare for libel? Or a Sir John Falstaff? Or a Mr Iago? Ruin for Shakespeare, I suppose. And (if imaginative literature has any value) some loss to the world. Accidental libel, the chance use of a fictitious name to which some real owner chooses to object, is the cruellest hazard to which an author is exposed. I am told that it offers no protection to say that one’s characters have no real existence, that they are invented with the rest of one’s story. Yet people in stories have to have names, and if they are to be credible they must be names drawn from the common stock of human nomenclature. For myself, apart from the financial risk, I should be deeply hurt if anyone tried to read himself or herself into a character of mine, for it would suggest laziness in my own imagination. So I do say that all the people in my tale, with the West Indian island in which it is set, are wholly and utterly imaginary. The sea, the trade wind, and the tropical bush are as real as I can make them, but the people who inhabit my story have precisely the same reality as the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

  I

  EARTHQUAKE

  ‘UNDER THE TABLE, I think,’ said our host. ‘At least it’s good honest mahogany.’

  He slid, quite gracefully, from his chair at the end of the big table to crouch under its comfortingly solid top. I watched the wall of the house swaying and followed him. I like to think that I waited a fraction of a second for the woman sitting opposite to me to go first: perhaps I did, but the situation was so confused that I have no clear recollection of our order of precedence in taking cover. The dignified Negro butler, who had just replenished our glasses with rum punch, came too. Thoughtfully, he clutched the big silver bowl of punch as he crawled to shelter.

  I had never before experienced an earthquake. This was quite different from a storm at sea. In a storm you know and feel your antagonist – wind and water can be killers, but they come at you in the open. This sick tremor that turned the stable world to a sort of jelly offered nothing you could even try to resist.

  ‘The Carima River will be flowing uphill now, sir,’ the butler said.

  I learned later that it is a popular belief that in Caribbean earthquakes the rivers reverse their flow. At the moment it didn’t seem to matter much. From my position under the table the field of view was restricted, but it was enough to bring the sudden realisation that I was looking at the countryside where there should have been a solid wall. I saw a magnificent poui tree, a mass of golden flowers, bow its superb head and turn over, almost in slow motion. The next moment there was a horrible tortured scream of shattering timbers as the house fell on us. I found that I was holding the woman’s hand, or she mine. The table shuddered as a mass of wreckage fell on it, but by some miracle of West Indian carpentry and the hard strength of mahogany, it did not collapse. It was as good a refuge as the Morrison steel table shelters used in air raids during the Second World War.

  Then there was a horrible smell of burning. ‘There can’t be any more house to fall, and the place will be on fire. We must get out,’ our host said.

  It wasn’t easy. The table that saved us was more or less intact, but it was surrounded by a junkyard of broken woodwork and bits of furniture. Because it had been built of wood, there wasn’t the choking mess of plaster dust that would have accompanied a house-fall in many parts of the world, but the house had stood for over a century, and there was dust enough. More dangerously, the inevitable fire that spreads from overturned cooking pots in kitchens was getting a savage hold on old, dry wood. Smoke filled our nostrils, and we could hear the dreadful crackle of flames getting nearer and nearer.

  The butler got out first, quickly followed by our host. They heaved and tore at broken beams, and somehow cleared a way for us. The butler lifted out the woman as if she was a child, and our host gave a hand to me. ‘Run,’ he said, as soon as we were clear.

  It was unnecessary advice – it was all that any of us wanted to do. Even so, the butler crawled back and salvaged the silver bowl before he started running. I glanced at my watch. It seemed unbelievable, but the whole disaster had taken place in rather less than four minutes.

  The house stood – more accurately, had stood – on a gentle slope rising from the Carima River. Between the house and the river, the land, once bush, had long been gardens, and as soon as we were clear of the ruins of the building we were safe enough. The big trees that were going to fall, had fallen – there was nothing left to fall. Telling the woman to go down to the river bank and wait for us there, our host, the butler and I ran round the blazing ruins to the kitchen compound at the back, to see what help we could give to anyone who might be trapped. The compound, like the servants’ quarters in most of the older West Indian houses, was single-storey, a row of rather flimsy low huts, roofed with coconut straw, grouped round three sides of a square. Their flimsy construction saved their occupants, and all seemed to have got out safely before the fire took hold. Satisfied that there was no one unaccounted for, we went back to the river. There was still some punch in the silver bowl. There were no glasses, and the butler solemnly handed the bowl to the woman to drink first.

  ‘Good work, Adam,’ said our host. When the woman had had a drink, he took the bowl from her and handed it to the butler. ‘You next, Adam,’ he said. The butler tried to refuse, but our host insisted. After Adam had drunk he gave the bowl to me. Never has rum punch tasted better. I gave the bowl in turn to our host with the curious feeling that the four of us were sharing in some almost sacred rite. Perhaps we were. Human survival is, in a way, sacred, and is certainly the basis of much religious feeling.

  *

  When Sir Edmund Pusey said to me, ‘Peter, you need a holiday, and I’ve arranged just the thing for you, at the taxpayers’ expense, too,’ I was naturally wary.

  ‘Where do you want me to go?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘To Nueva.’

  ‘And where is Nueva?’

  ‘I don’t believe you are as ignorant as all that. Nueva is the largest and least known of the Lesser Antilles. Next to Barbados, which was taken by the British in 1605, it is, or rather was, for it is independent now, the oldest British colony in the West Indies. It is somewhat off the main sailing routes, about 150 miles ENE of Dominica, and more nearly in the Atlantic than the other West Indian islands. You go there comfortably by air nowadays, and the island is exceptionally beautiful.’

  ‘If the place is independent, what is it to do with us?’

  ‘Peter! I said I was
sending you on holiday! Of course, there is a little job you might undertake in your spare time, as it were, when you’re not swimming or drinking rum, to justify your expenses.’

  I felt still more alarmed. Sir Edmund is head of the Police Liaison Department at the Home Office, a powerful but little publicised arm of Government that acts partly as a kind of General Staff in the endless war against crime, partly as a co-ordinating body when the work of the police and the various defence and intelligence services is liable to overlap. I had been a regular officer in the Army – became, indeed, the youngest major in my regiment – but I left the Army when the regiment was amalgamated with two others, and there were three majors for every major’s job. I went into industry and had another career as an up-and-coming tycoon. But that career, and with it my marriage, crashed when the firm of which I was general sales director was taken over by an even bigger concern. I had retired to what had been my father’s cottage in South Devon, to lick my wounds and prove to myself that I could make a living with my hands as a carpenter when I got into Sir Edmund’s clutches by becoming fortuitously involved in a curious case of drug-smuggling, in which, with my small boat which was my other passion in life, I was able to render some service to the police. After that he recruited me for a number of what he called his ‘little jobs’, and finally had me recalled to the Army, promoted colonel, and seconded to his department as the representative of the armed services. Sir Edmund has many merits – imagination, high intelligence, and absolute loyalty to members of his staff. Against that, he is tiresomely ready to assume that you will always do whatever he wants done, and he is a little inclined to tell you half a story, reckoning that it is good for your soul, your wits, or something to work out the other half.

  ‘Do you even know what the job is?’ I asked coldly.

  ‘Well, up to a point. But that’s why I need you, Peter. You have a remarkable way of getting to the bottom of things.’

  ‘Cut out the flattery. What is it this time?’

  In another life, Sir Edmund would have made a good professor. He adopted what I call his lecturing posture, putting the tips of his fingers together, and looking beyond you rather than at you.

  ‘You are quite right in holding that we have no business to interfere in the affairs of an independent former colony,’ he said. ‘But things are seldom as simple as they seem. The Nuevan Government still turns to us for technical assistance in all sorts of things, and the Nuevan economy is almost wholly dependent on loans and grants from the British taxpayer, and such other international aid as Her Majesty’s Government can help the island to obtain. Nueva has no oil, or asphalt, like Trinidad, no bauxite or banana industry, like Jamaica. Throughout its history the island has relied on one crop – sugar. Before the First World War, when beet sugar was virtually unknown, cane sugar was a reliable staple. It is very different nowadays – the world sugar market is a complex and bewildering affair. Nueva has a little cotton, the beautiful long-stapled West Indian cotton which produces the finest cotton fabrics in the world. But cotton has been severely hit by competition from synthetic fibres. With the grants and loans it gets, the Nuevan Government is trying to develop a citrus fruit industry – the limes from its neighbour Dominica are world famous – and, of course, it is doing everything it can to develop the tourist trade. Providing luxurious holidays for millionaires is not, however, the healthiest of economic activities for a native population, most of whom are desperately poor.

  ‘Nueva is cursed – or blessed, but sometimes such blessings take a long time to confer benefits – with a multi-racial society – Negro, East Indian and Chinese, with a handful of Europeans and a considerable community of mixed blood. In the mountainous interior there are even still a few indigenous Caribs, but they don’t leave their mountains much. The island is quite big – about the size of Lincolnshire.

  ‘The Negroes were brought originally from Africa as slaves. With the abolition of slavery the Negro population was understandably reluctant to continue working on the sugar estates, but these had to have labour. The problem was solved in nineteenth-century fashion by importing Chinese labourers under a system of indenture – so many years’ work on the plantations after which they could, if they wished, be repatriated. When their indentured time was up, many of the Chinese preferred to stay on in Nueva. But not as labourers. Frugal, industrious, and often exceedingly able, the Chinese turned to shopkeeping and money-lending, building up big businesses – on a Nuevan scale – and not infrequently becoming the owners of plantations to whose masters they lent money on mortgage. That meant another problem of finding labour for the cane fields. This time it was met by bringing in indentured labour from India. Like the Chinese, many of the East Indians – they are called East Indians to distinguish them from the native peoples of the West Indies, whose name perpetuates Columbus’s error in believing that he had reached India – stayed on. Again, they did not stay on as labourers. They became the community’s artisans and technicians, mechanics, brass-workers and silversmiths, and, a generation later, doctors, dentists and lawyers. Of course the divisions now between these various racial groups are not clear cut, but they retain a distinct racial entity which does not make for easy politics.

  ‘The Prime Minister – unusual in the West Indies – is Chinese. He is called Mr Li Cook, and although the third generation of Nuevan-born Chinese he is pure Chinese: the Chinese and the East Indians have never gone in much for marriage outside their own communities. His curious mixture of a name is typical of the West Indian melting pot of peoples and languages – whether “Cook” is a corruption of some Chinese name, or adopted from the name of some English planter whose estate the Li family took over, I don’t know. He seems a good chap. He has just been in London for various negotiations with our Government, and in the course of his visit he came to see me.’

  Sir Edmund paused. I know a little Spanish, and said, ‘Isn’t it rather ridiculous for an island – a country now, I suppose – to be called simply “New”?’

  The professorial manner was maintained. ‘It’s just part of the historical muddle. The island is said to have been discovered by Columbus on his second voyage, though there is not much real evidence. Its original name was Nueva Rabida, called after a monastery at La Rabida, near Palos, where Columbus certainly stayed when he was making preparations for his first voyage from Palos. The “Rabida” does rather suggest that Columbus gave the place its name. However, when the English got there “Nueva Rabida” was too much for the lazy English tongue, and the “Rabida” was soon dropped. It’s been plain “Nueva” ever since. There’s a precedent for this. When I was in the Diplomatic Service I served briefly in Ethiopia. The name of the capital – Addis Ababa – means “New Flowers” in Amharic. Most foreigners simply call it “Addis”. If it’s not your own language a place-name has no particular meaning except to denote a place.’

  ‘All right. I’m not going to alter the map. But why do you want me to go there?’

  ‘Mr Li Cook is in trouble. He heads a fairly broadbased coalition, and as far as one can tell he is making a genuine effort to develop the Nuevan economy. The difficulties are appalling. He is aware of the dangers of over-dependence on tourists, but he has got to get foreign exchange from somewhere, and tourists are the quickest source of it. Moreover, although there’s a coalition Government there are a couple of more extreme political parties outside it, and a vocal Opposition. They’re all for a get-rich-quick policy, and in favour of selling off a large part of the island’s Atlantic coast to an American syndicate for development as a hotel and villa playground.’

  ‘Not our business.’

  ‘No . . . but it’s not as simple as that. The Opposition seems to be an odd political mixture, keen on getting hold of American capital, but also standing for a kind of violent left-wing nationalism. In Mr Li’s view, they only want American development so that at the appropriate moment they can stir up trouble and take over the lot.’

  ‘Again, not our business.’ br />
  ‘Directly, of course not. But have a look at the map.’ He had an atlas on his desk, already opened on a general map of the North Atlantic. I went over to join him in studying it. He pointed to Nueva, a dot in the ocean. It was a dot, though, in a highly significant place, with nothing but sea between it and the British Isles, New York, and the Gibraltar entrance to the Mediterranean.

  ‘A marvellous base for long-range submarines,’ Sir Edmund said reflectively. ‘It was not for nothing that the West Indies were fought over again and again when Britain, France and Spain were disputing for sea-power. Politically, the world may have changed – I doubt if it has changed much strategically . . . You don’t know this yet, but there is a special feature of the Atlantic coast of Nueva which makes it peculiarly suitable for a submarine base, the Chacarima caves. They are the deepest caves in the world, and they have never been fully explored. Many of the islands are volcanic. Nueva certainly is, and the caves are supposed to have been formed in some underground eruption in the geological past. The Carima River flows through them, emerging to reach the sea in a long, narrow bay, the Chacarima Inlet. This is all deep water, like a Norwegian fjord, and the deep water extends underground far inland through the caves. Fleets of submarines could lie up there, impervious to air attack, safe, perhaps, even from a nuclear bomb.

  ‘The coast around the inlet is exceptionally beautiful, with long beaches of white sand. This is the area that the Opposition sees as the principal site of American tourist development.’

  ‘In American hands it would seem reasonably safe from being used for other purposes.’

  ‘If the Americans kept it, perhaps. The fear is that American money would be used for site engineering roadworks, harbour installations and the like, and then the whole development would be taken over.’

  ‘Can’t the Prime Minister put a stop to anything of that sort?’