“Sorry, sir, I only meant—”
“We’ll do a three-sixty around the base of the tree,” Congreve said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves from Sutherland’s murder bag. “Fifteen-foot radius out. You go that way, I’ll go anticlockwise. Surplus to requirements, eh? Is that what they think? By God, they’ve got another think coming, Sutherland!”
Twenty minutes later, their rain gear covered with mud, twigs, and soggy leaves, the two policemen met on the opposite side of the tree. “Well. Good cursory examination, I daresay. Let’s do it again, shall we? I’ll take your half,” Congreve said. He dropped to his knees and, torch in one hand, began delicately turning over layers of leaves with the other.
Sutherland’s heart skipped a beat when, not five minutes later, he heard Congreve exclaim, “A-ha!”
No matter how many times he’d heard Ambrose Congreve say it, he knew an a-ha meant only one thing. A cold trail had just grown considerably warmer.
“What have you got, Chief?” he asked peering over the older man’s shoulder at a soggy blackish object pinched twixt his thumb and forefinger.
“Not sure. Try and keep your light on it, will you? What’s it look like to you?”
“No idea. A moldy root of some kind?”
Congreve had his spatula blade out and was levering the thing into a clear plastic evidence bag.
“Looks like, yes, which is why your scene-of-crime chaps missed it, prone as they are to snap judgments. Cigar, actually,” he said, holding the transparent bag up to Sutherland’s light. “See the teeth marks?”
Ross peered at the thing from the other side.
“Yes,” he said. “And, here, looks like a bit of foil from the wrapper embedded in the wrapper leaf. Do you see it?”
Chapter Six
Georgetown
ALEX HAWKE COULDN’T SLEEP. HE COULDN’T STAND BEING alone in his big empty Georgetown house in Washington and he couldn’t imagine being back in England drowning in all that bloody tea and sympathy. He rolled over and looked at the clock by the bedside. Midnight. Christ. He flipped the lamp on and picked up his book, a battered first edition of Pigs Have Wings.
Wodehouse had been, since childhood, one of the few authors with even the slightest ability to pick him up and drag him, kicking and screaming, into a passably good humor. He must have read this particular novel ten times over and it never lost its capacity to make him laugh out loud. He read for fifteen minutes, sat straight up in bed, and hurled the hardcover across the room.
Even Wodehouse had failed him.
He managed to hit a particularly hideous Waterford crystal table vase someone had sent as a wedding present (why Pelham had unwrapped the ghastly object and left it there was still a mystery), which smashed against the wall with a most satisfying crashing sound. Like glass cymbals struck with a heavy wooden mallet.
There. That’s a little better, he thought, eyes darting hungrily round the room seeking something even more substantial to splinter into a thousand pieces.
He was about to crawl out of bed and pour himself a stiff brandy prior to putting his fist through a wall when the telephone jangled.
“Hello!” he snarled, not bothering to disguise his mood.
“Can’t sleep?”
“What?”
“I saw your bedroom light go on.”
“Hiya, Conch. How the bloody hell are you?”
“Swell. Cloud Nine. Happier than a pig in—”
“You rang to cheer me up, is that it?”
Consuelo de los Reyes, Conch, was the American Secretary of State. She was rather beautiful and keen- minded, and she lived just across the road. Hawke’s neighbor for some two years now. She’d also been Alex’s lover. But that was longer ago than either of them cared to remember. Check that. Conch cared to remember. And she never let Alex forget it.
“Hey, Mister. Remember me? Your old fishing buddy?”
“Sorry. I’m in a thoroughly despicable humor.”
“Good. Me, too. Let’s have a drink.”
“Brilliant idea. Your place or mine?”
“Yours. You have a much better wine cellar. Give me five to throw something on.”
The doorbell chimed half an hour later and Hawke answered it, a bottle of Lafitte ’53 in hand. The old adage, ‘Life is too short to drink cheap wine,’ had never seemed more appropriate. Fully aware since childhood that we’re all hanging by a thread every second of our lives, the savagery on the steps of St. John’s had put paid to Hawke’s most fragile notion of security.
Hawke pulled the heavy door open.
Conch’s eyes glistened, and she wrapped her arms around him, her right hand patting him softly on the shoulder. They stood there in the doorway, silent, just holding on.
Finally, Alex pulled away and looked down at her upturned face, speaking softly.
“Should we skip the wine and go directly to the tequila?” He tried a smile and almost managed it.
“I make a mean Margarita, buster.”
“The meanest goddamn Margarita between Key West and Key Largo.”
The two had met down in the Keys. Hawke had been determined to learn how to catch bonefish, and Conch, a Cuban who’d grown up in the Florida archipelago, was the acknowledged master. She was just out of Harvard with a brand new doctorate in political science the summer they’d met. A free spirit, taking a year off to decide what to do with her life, and meanwhile earning a pretty good living as a bone guide out of Cheeca Lodge on Islamorada.
The Cheeca’s bar overlooking the ocean was a favorite watering hole for local captains and bone guides, and Conch had met the tall Englishman with the curly black hair there the afternoon he’d arrived. Unlike most of the tourists, who sported gaily colored tropical fishing shirts, Alex Hawke was wearing a simple navy blue linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows over his finely muscled forearms.
“Bartender over there tells me you’re headed down to Key West for dinner tonight,” the deeply tanned, deeply beautiful woman had said to him that first afternoon. She was wearing khaki shorts and a coral cotton shirt that did little to hide her lush figure.
“As a matter of fact, yes I am,” Hawke replied smiling, already hooked, but not in the boat yet.
“Bad idea,” she said, shaking her head.
“Really? Why on earth should that be?”
“Crime rate has skyrocketed down there,” she deadpanned. “Chief of police is a good pal of mine. Just between you and me, he tells me the number of drive-by spankings has tripled in the last six months.”
Hawke, who had some idea of the sexual demographics of Key West, had laughed out loud.
Within an hour, Conch had a new bonefishing client. Twelve hours later they were out on the flats, the sun was shining, the beer was cold, and they were already making a lot of memories. Alex proved an adept pupil, though he didn’t have the patience required for the wily Mr. Bone. He’d taken a great delight in hooking sharks on the light tackle, fighting them all the way to the flats boat. ‘Bit more sporting like this, don’t you think?’ he’d said with his boyish grin, his spinning rod bent double by a large shark.
A week of Budweiser, Buffett, and the most beautiful sunsets Hawke had ever seen would spin them whirling permanently into each other’s orbits. Lovers, friends, lovers, friends. They’d last stopped the wheel on friends and that’s the way it had been ever since.
“Answering his own door,” Conch said, trailing Hawke into the kitchen. She saw a spoon standing upright in a half-eaten tin of macaroni and cheese. “Staff has the night off? Where’s dear old Pelham?”
“Dear old Pelham is upstairs in his bed. Not feeling well, I’m afraid. I took some tomato soup and toast up to
