The Deceiver

Government House money, offered a reward of one thousand U.S. dollars to anyone reporting seeing someone in the alley behind the wall of the Government House garden at approximately five P.M. on Tuesday evening.

A thousand American dollars was a stunning sum for the ordinary people of Port Plaisance. It should bring someone out—someone who had seen something, or some person. And in Sunshine everybody knew everybody.

At the airstrip Hannah saw to the loading of the body, accompanied by Bannister and the four men of the Bahamian forensic team. Bannister would see that the entire volume of their scrapings and samples went on the evening flight to London, to be collected at dawn by a squad car from Scotland Yard and taken to the Home Office’s forensic laboratory in Lambeth. He had few hopes it would turn up much; it was the second bullet he wanted, and Dr. West would retrieve that for him when he opened the body in Nassau that night.

Because he was at the airstrip, Hannah missed the Johnson rally in Parliament Square that afternoon. So did the press corps, who having covered the start of the rally, saw the police convoy driving past and followed it out to the airstrip.

McCready did not miss the rally. He was on the verandah of the Quarter Deck Hotel at the time.

A desultory crowd of about two hundred had gathered to hear their philanthropic benefactor address them. McCready noticed half a dozen men in brightly colored beach shirts and dark glasses mingling with the crowd, handing out small pieces of paper and flags on sticks. The flags were in the candidate’s blue and white colors. The pieces of paper were dollar bills.

At precisely ten past three, a white Ford Fairlane—cer­tainly the biggest car on the island—swept into the square and up to the speaking platform. Mr. Marcus Johnson leaped out and ascended the steps. He held up his hands in a boxer’s victory salute. Led by the bright-shirted ones, there was a round of applause. Some flags waved. In minutes, Marcus Johnson was into his speech.

“And I promise you, my friends, and you are all my friends”—the dentifrice smile flashed from the bronze face—“when we are finally free, a wave of prosperity will come to these islands. There will be work—in the hotels, in the new marina, in the bars and cafйs, in the new industries for the processing of fish from the sea for sale on the mainland—from all these things, prosperity will flow. And it will flow into your pockets, my friends, not into the hands of men far away in London—”

He was using a bullhorn to reach everyone in the square. The interruption came from a man who did not need a bullhorn. The deep bass came from the other side of the square, but it came over the sound of the politician.

“Johnson!” roared Walter Drake. “We do not want you here! Why don’t you go back where you came from, and take your Yardies with you?”

Suddenly there was silence. The stunned crowd waited for the sky to fall. No one had ever interrupted Marcus Johnson before.

But the sky did not fall. Without a word, Johnson put down his megaphone and jumped into his car. At a word from him, it sped off, pursued by a second car containing his group of helpers.

“Who is that?” McCready asked the waiter on the veran­dah.

“Reverend Drake, sir,” said the waiter. He seemed awe­struck, even rather frightened.

McCready was thoughtful. He had heard a voice used like that somewhere before, and he tried to recall where. Then he placed it; during his National Service thirty years earlier, at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. On a parade ground. He went to his room and made a secure call to Miami.

Reverend Walter Drake took his beating in silence. There were four of them, and they came for him that night as he left his church and walked home. They used baseball bats and their feet. They hit hard, whipping the wooden staves down onto the man on the ground. When they were finished, they left him. He might have been dead. They would not have minded. But he was not.

Half an hour later, he recovered consciousness and crawled to the nearest house. The frightened family called Dr. Caractacus Jones, who had the preacher brought to his clinic on a handcart, and he spent the rest of the night patching him up.

Desmond Hannah had a call that evening during supper. He had to leave the hotel to go to Government House to take it. It was from Dr. West in Nassau.

“Look, I know they’re supposed to be preserved,” said the forensic pathologist, “but this one’s like a block of wood. Frozen solid.”

“The locals did the best they could,” said Hannah.

“So will I,” said the doctor. “But it’s going to take me twenty-four hours to thaw the bugger out.”

“As fast as you can, please,” said Hannah. “I need that damned bullet.”

Chapter 4

Detective Chief Superintendent Hannah elected to interview Mr. Horatio Livingstone first. He rang him at his house in Shantytown just after sunrise, and the politician came to the phone after several minutes. Yes, he would be delighted to receive the man from Scotland Yard within the hour.

Oscar drove the Jaguar with Detective Parker beside him. Hannah was in the back with Dillon of the Foreign Office. Their route did not pass through the center of Port Plaisance, for Shantytown lay three miles down the coast, on the same side of the capital as Government House.

“Any progress with your inquiries, Mr. Hannah, or is that an unprofessional question?” Dillon asked politely.

Hannah never liked to discuss the state of an inquiry with anyone other than colleagues. Still, this Dillon was apparently from the Foreign Office.

“The Governor was killed by a single shot through the heart from a heavy-caliber handgun,” he said. “There seem to have been two shots fired. One missed and hit the wall behind him. I recovered the slug and sent it to London.”

“Badly distorted?” asked Dillon.

“I’m afraid so. The other bullet seems to be lodged in the body. I’ll know more when I get the results of the post­mortem from Nassau tonight.”

“And the killer?”

“Seems to have entered from the gate in the garden wall, which was torn off its locks. Fired from about a ten-foot range, then withdrew. Apparently.”

“Apparently?”

Hannah explained his idea that the torn-off lock might have been a ruse to distract attention from an assassin coming from the house itself.

Dillon was most admiring. “I’d never have thought of that,” he said.

The car entered Shantytown. As its name implied, it was a village of clustered homes made of wooden planks and galva­nized sheet roofing, with some five thousand inhabitants.

Small shops selling an array of vegetables and T-shirts jostled for space with the houses and the bars. It was clearly Livingstone territory—no posters for Marcus Johnson were to be seen here, but those for Livingstone were everywhere.

In the center of Shantytown, reached by its widest (and only) street, stood a single walled compound. The walls were of coral blocks, and a single gate wide enough for a car admitted entry. Beyond the walls could be seen the roof of the house, the only two-story edifice in Shantytown. Hannah knew of the rumor that Mr. Livingstone owned many of the bars in the village and took tribute from those he did not.

The Jaguar halted at the gate, and Stone sounded the horn. All down the street, Barclayans were standing to stare at the gleaming limousine with the pennant fluttering from the front right wing. The Governor’s car had never been into Shanty­town before.

A small window in the gate opened, an eye surveyed the car, and the gate swung open. The Jaguar rolled forward into a dusty yard and stopped by the verandah to the house. Two men were in the yard, one by the gate and one waiting at the verandah. Both wore identical pale-gray safari suits. A third man in similar dress stood at an upstairs window. As the car halted, he withdrew.

Hannah, Parker, and Dillon were shown into the principal sitting room, cheaply but functionally furnished, and