Ever since she had arrived in the Caribbean, she seemed to have had the tune echoing in her ears. How old was it? How many years was it since the inimitable Harry Belafonte had first implanted it in everybody’s consciousness? No matter. Whatever its age, the calypso was still being sung today with charm, vigour, and a certain relentlessness on Bow Island, and on the other West Indian islands she had visited in the course of her journey.
It was not the only tune to be heard, of course. The loud noise of music, she had discovered, was an inseparable part of Caribbean life, starting with the airport. The heavy, irresistible beat of the steel band, the honeyed wail of the singers, all this was happening somewhere if not everywhere all over the islands late into the night: the joyous sound of freedom, of dancing, of drinking (rum punch), and, for the tourists at any rate, the sound of holiday.
It wasn’t the sound of holiday for Jemima Shore, Investigator. Or not officially so. That was all to the good, Jemima being one of those people temperamentally whose best holidays combined some work with a good deal of pleasure. She could hardly believe it when Megalith Television, her employers, had agreed to a program which took her away from freezing Britain to the sunny Caribbean in late January. This was a reversal of normal practice, by which Cy Fredericks, Jemima’s boss — and the effective boss of Megalith — was generally to be found relaxing in the Caribbean in February while Jemima herself, if she got there at all, was liable to be dispatched there in the inconvenient humidity of August. And it was a fascinat-ing project to boot. This was definitely her lucky year.
“This is my island in the sun—” But what the young man facing her had actually sung was “your graveyard in the sun.” Hers? Or whose? Since the man was standing between Jemima and the historic grave she had come to visit, it was possible that he was being pro-prietorial as well as aggressive. On second thought, surely not. It was a joke, a cheerful joke on a cheerful, very sunny day. But the young man’s expression was, it seemed to her, more threatening than that.
Jemima gazed back with that special sweet smile so familiar to viewers of British television. (These same viewers were also aware from past experience that Jemima, sweet as her smile might be, stood no nonsense from anyone, at least not on her program.) On closer inspection, the man was not really as young as all that. She saw someone of perhaps roughly her own age — early thirties. He was white, although so deeply tanned that she guessed he wasn’t a tourist but one of the small loyal European population of Bow Island, a place fiercely proud of its recent independence from a much larger neighbor.
The stranger’s height, unlike his youth, was not an illusion. He towered over Jemima and she herself was not short. He was also handsome, or would have been except for an oddly formed, rather large nose with a high bridge to it and a pronounced aquiline curve.
But if the nose marred the regularity of his features, the impression left was not unattractive. He was wearing whitish cotton shorts, like more or less every male on Bow Island, black or white. His orange T-shirt bore the familiar island logo or crest: the outline of a bow in black and a black hand drawing it back. Beneath the logo was printed one of the enormous variety of local slogans — cheerful again — designed to make a play upon the island’s name. This one read: THIS IS THE END OF THE SUN-BOW!
No, in that friendly T-shirt, he was surely not intending to be aggressive.
In that case, the odd thing about the whole encounter was that the stranger still stood absolutely still in Jemima’s path. She could glimpse the large stone Archer Tomb just behind him, which she recognized from the postcards. For a smallish place, Bow Island was remarkably rich in historic relics. Nelson in his time had visited it with his fleet, for like its neighbors Bow Island had found itself en-gulfed in the Napoleonic Wars. Two hundred or so years before that, first British, then French, then British again had invaded and settled the island which had once belonged to Caribs, and before that Arawaks. Finally, into this melting pot, Africans had been brought forcibly to work the sugar plantations on which its wealth depended. All these elements in various degrees had gone to make up the people now known casually among themselves as the Bo’landers.
The Archer Tomb, the existence of which had in a sense brought Jemima across the Atlantic, belonged to the period of the second — and final — British settlement. Here was buried the most celebrated Governor in Bow Island’s history, Sir Valentine Archer.
Even its name commemorated his long reign. Bow Island had originally been called by the name of a saint, and while it was true the island was vaguely formed in the shape of a bow it was Governor Archer who had made the change: to signify ritu-ally that this particular archer was in command of this particular bow.
Jemima knew that the monument, splendidly carved, would show Sir Valentine Archer with Isabella, his wife, beside him. This double stone bier was capped with a white wood structure reminiscent of a small church, done either to give the whole monument additional importance — although it must always have dominated the small churchyard by its sheer size — or to protect it from the weather. Jemima had read that there were no Archer children inscribed on the tomb, contrary to the usual seventeenth-century practice. This was because, as a local historian delicately put it, Governor Archer had been as a parent to the entire island. Or in the words of another purely local calypso:
“Across the sea came old Sir Valentine—
He came to be your daddy, and he came to be mine.”
In short, no one monument could comprise the progeny of a man popularly supposed to have sired over a hundred children, legitimate and illegitimate. The legitimate line was, however, now on the point of dying out. It was to see Miss Isabella Archer, officially at least the last of her race, that Jemima had come to the Caribbean. She hoped to make a program about the old lady and her home, Archer Plantation House, alleged to be untouched in its decoration these fifty years. She wanted also to interview her generally about the changes Miss Archer had seen in her lifetime in this part of the world.
“Greg Harrison,” said the man standing in Jemima’s path suddenly. “And this is my sister, Coralie.” A girl who had been standing unnoticed by Jemima in the shade of the arched church porch stepped rather shyly forward. She, too, was extremely brown and her blond hair, whitened almost to flax by the sun, was pulled back into a ponytail. His sister. Was there a resemblance? Coralie Harrison was wearing a similar orange T-shirt, but otherwise she was not much like her brother. She was quite short, for one thing, and her features were appealing rather than beautiful — and, perhaps fortunately, she lacked her brother’s commanding nose.
“Welcome to Bow Island, Miss Shore,” she began. But her brother interrupted her. He put out a hand, large, muscular, and burnt to nut color by the sun.
“I know why you’re here and I don t like it,” said Greg Harrison.
“Stirring up forgotten things. Why don’t you leave Miss Izzy to die in peace?” The contrast between his apparently friendly handshake and the hostile, if calmly spoken words was disconcerting.
“I’m jemima Shore,” she said, though he obviously knew that.
“Am I going to be allowed to inspect the Archer Tomb? Or is it to be across your dead body?” Jemima smiled again with sweetness.
“My dead body!” Greg Harrison smiled back in his turn. The effect, however, was not particularly warming. “Have you come armed to the teeth, then?” Before she could answer, he began to hum the famous calypso again, jemima imagined the words: “This is your graveyard in the sun.” Then he added: “Might not be such a bad idea, that, when you start to dig up things that should be buried.”