It was still a normal day in the gay, glamorouslifeof a freelance pilot roaming the blue skies of the sun-kissed Caribbean. Or of a shoestring operator selling a luxury product that most people didn't need, didn't even want, and certainly couldn't afford. A street-corner match-seller with a tray full of diamond-studded matchboxes.
It depends on your point of view. Right now, my view was that it was the cocktail hour.
I was in the bar of the Myrtle Bank Hotel just before six. It's an old hotel – by Jamaican standards – and planted right down in the business quarters on the waterfront, so that freighters dock on either side of the back garden. And with the bar an open-sided affair out there in the garden instead of inside and sunk in total gloom as per the New York ideals of the latest hotels.
The barman handed me a Red Stripe beer and a message without being asked for either. This year, the Myrtle Bank bar was as close to an office as I could afford, and him as close to a secretary. The beer was cold and the message wasn't much warmer: I was to call on J.B. Penrose the next morning at eleven am sharp.
I didn't know J.B. Penrose from the cat's stepmother and my first idea was that I didn't want to. Even in the barman's thick, laboured scrawl the tone came over as clear as across a frosty parade ground: call on – not just call – J.B. Penrose in Apartment C, the Shaw Park Beach Club, at eleven.
Only fifty miles off, right across the island on the north coast.
I drank my beer and thought about ringing Penrose and telling him to spend the morning swimming outside the reef with the other sharks. Then I started on my second beer and thought about Shaw Park.
The 'Club' bit is deceptive. It started life that way, when the north coast was strictly for winter residents, with no hotels or tourist trash like bank presidents. But when the tourists started coming anyway, the Shaw Park remembered it ownedthe best beach on the island, and ran up a couple of blocks of rooms and two more of thedeluxe apartments. I'd visited one of these apartments before: if J.B. Penrose was staying in one of them, he liked diamond-studded matchboxes.
SEVEN
I landed on the north coast at a quarter to eleven the next morning.
Some pretty inventive writers have lived within a few miles of Boscobel airstrip, Ian Fleming and Noel Coward among them, but none of them in the same class as the man who thought up the sign on the Jamaican Air Service hut there. Itsays: WELCOME TOOCHO RÍOSAIRPORT.
Point one: it isn't at Ochoríos,which is where most of the big hotels are, but twelve miles east at Oracabessa. Point two: it isn't an airport. It's a 3,000-foot tarmac strip wedged in between the sea and the hills, and you couldn't even operate a Dakota off that. Mostly it's used by the crop-spray planes working over the banana plantations on the slopes.
I was standing there admiring the sign while the clerk in the hut phoned various millionaires who drive taxis in those parts, when one of the crop-spray pilots walked up and thumped me on the back. He'd probably just finished his day's work: they fly from first light until the sun starts up too many updrafts off the plantation slopes.
'What's the big twin-engined boy doing down in the jungle – slumming?'
'Clients at Shaw Park. I hope.'
'The film people?'
I looked puzzled. 'Not another film?'
'Of course. Don't you read your Daily Gleaner? Ruddy Hollywood up here, boy.' And he was about right; they were always shooting some Technicolor epic on this part of the north coast. It was great film country: sun, palm trees, hills, beaches – and half a dozen luxury hotels just up the road. Sometimes they turned it into a Pacific island, sometimes Darkest Africa; twice they forgot where they were and shot films about Jamaica, but probably somebody got fired for that.
'Where are we this time?' I asked.
'Headwaters of the Amazon, I think. South America, anyway. Makes a change from the Congo.' He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a long streak of oil in its place. 'So when are you going to drop this fancy air-taxi stuff and come and do some real work with us?'
'Tomorrow, if they keep pushing on my fuel bill.'
'See you at five in the morning, then.'
'Make it nine; I'm getting old.'
He grinned. 'You'll get used to it. The only trouble is getting a whole evening's drinking done at lunchtime. Think of it as a dawn patrol – you should know all about that, after fighters.'
I said slowly: 'Everybody keeps remembering I flew fighters. These days I'm a Dove driver.'
He grinned, thumped my shoulder again, and started towards the hut. 'Still, must be nice to know you've got something to fall back on.'
'Like the Blue Mountains?' I called after him. He laughed over his shoulder and went on out.
To me, it wasn't all that funny. He was making money -probably £7,000 a year – but he was earning it, too. I knew he'd smashed up once already, spraying from twenty feet up and finding himself flying up a blind gully with a sheer slope ahead. They wrote off a plane a year, on average.
Perhaps I reallywas getting old.
I reached Shaw Park just after eleven and saved a couple of minutes by taking a short cut through the walled car park instead of going round through the lobby. That put me right opposite the front door to Apartment C.
The apartments were built in two-storey blocks – two up, two down – that looked oddly like English suburban houses, transplanted 4,000 miles and slightly overgrown under the tropical sun. I pressed the doorbell and waited.
No answer. I tried again; still no answer. So? All right, I admit I was a few minutes late, but in Jamaican terms that's early. But maybe J.B. Penrose hadn't got fully acclimatised yet; maybe he still thought eleven meant eleven and at two minutes past he had a date to fly to New York and buy the Rockefeller Plaza.
Damn. I was beginning to think I'd wasted a morning and several gallons of fuel.
As a last chance, I tried the door and it opened. I thought about that for a moment, then decided the least I could do was find out if Penrose had packed and gone. I walked in down a shadowy corridor and out into the dining room.
From the inside, you forgot all about the English suburban look. It was a big, cool room with one wall of sliding glass doors looking out across a private walled patio to the glare of the beach and sea beyond. Almost everything in the room was white: the walls, the small coffee-table, the sideboards, the Spanish metalwork of the chairs and the round glass-topped table, the four desk lamps. It was a very nice room; the only thing wrong with it was that there was nobody there except a small dark lizard.
He was clinging to the wall by some private theory of anti-gravity, his head cocked and giving me a bright suspicious stare. I nodded to him and walked over to the open glass doors and looked out. The patio had a clutter of alloy and plastic beach chairs, but nothing else. A few people were swimming near the shore, and a couple of metal dinghies with bright sails were staggering around between the stone piers. But all very quietly. Shaw Park clients don't laugh out loud.
I turned back into the room. The lizard had his head screwed round 180 degrees, still watching me, so I asked: 'You don't happen to know a J.B. Penrose who's supposed to be staying here?' He went on watching. 'In fact, you don't happen tobe J.B. Penrose, do you?'
That did it; he nickered across the wall and out of sight behind a hanging picture. Residents hate being mistaken for tourists. I shrugged and started for the bedroom door, then thought to check the sideboard first.
That was definitely progress. The sideboard held three near-full bottles of gin, white Cinzano and Canadian Club, a few clean glasses and two leather-bound volumes on American contract law. Penrose might have walked out on the bottles – from the amount in them he didn't seem to be a serious drinking man – but if the law-books were worth bringing they were worth taking home again. For me, at ten past eleven in the morning, that wasn't a bad bit of deduction.