Sun, Sand, Murder Page 5
My musings were interrupted by a cough from the number two diesel generator, followed by a mechanical sigh and the generator’s complete shutdown. The Anegada power grid was now overloaded, with the older number one generator unable to keep up with the early evening demand for electricity. If I did not cut power to part of the island, the grid would fail completely and all of Anegada would black out.
I made the choice I had made a hundred times before, cutting off electricity to The Settlement and keeping power flowing to the western half of the island. The unwritten rule was to never kill the lights at the Reef Hotel, Neptune’s Treasure, the Pomato Point Restaurant, and the Lobster Trap grill when the tourists were having their sundowners and the restaurant kitchens were in the midst of preparing their evening meals. A little hardship for the locals was preferable to any discomfort for the tourists and their credit cards. It was always the choice made; any disruption of the relaxation of the bareboaters, honeymooners, and bonefish anglers equated to an interruption of cash flow for Anegada and the British Virgin Islands.
An hour passed as I disassembled and cleaned the number two generator’s fuel filter, hoping this simple fix would do the trick. I tried a restart. Sputtering and gasping like a rescued drowning victim, the generator finally jolted back to life.
The lights came on in The Settlement and at that moment I knew in the pit of my stomach that the murder would never be solved by Rollie Stoutt. It would never be solved because Paul Kelliher, or whoever he was, was not a tourist, or a local belonger, and thus he did not matter. It would never be solved because that would mean telling the world that the pristine beaches and the laid-back bars and restaurants of Anegada are located in a place where a drug deal can go bad, a robbery can end in death, or a jealous lover can bring in a gun to exact revenge. It would never be solved because a solution would expose something dark, sinister, and ugly about a place that is a Caribbean fantasy of tranquillity and leisure. The absence of a solution meant the eventual return of the serenity and calm without the blemish that the hard facts would cause. The inconvenience of the murder would simply fade away.
I knew it was not intentional. It was the product of our collective subconscious. Rollie Stoutt would work away at the investigation, but not too hard and not in a way that would dirty his hands by digging deep into troublesome facts. Rollie would periodically report his lack of progress to Deputy Commissioner Lane, who would report to the commissioner, who would report to the premier, until the item fell away from each of their meeting agendas. With no family demanding answers and calling for justice, whoever had committed the murder at Spanish Camp would remain at liberty and unknown.
And just as I knew this murder would never be solved by Inspector Stoutt, I knew I had to try to solve it. Maybe I needed to try to satisfy myself that Anegada was still a simple, peaceful, crime-free place. Maybe I needed to see the person who had left Kelliher to the crabs and gulls answer for what he had done. Maybe I felt the need to redeem myself with the deputy commissioner. Maybe I was in the middle years of a life of too many uneventful patrols around the island, too many dull shifts at the power plant, and too many sunny days with no good news and no bad news melting one into another. But I knew I had to try. I would start the next morning.
* * *
As I walked home from work at eight, I got a hug and kiss from Kevin and Tamia, who were on their way to school along with the three dozen other children who attended the Anegada School. Icilda was working the breakfast and lunch shift at the Reef Hotel and was already gone when I arrived. After a breakfast of johnnycake and tepid coffee from the morning’s pot, I changed into my uniform pants and shirt. If I was going to conduct a police investigation, I would look the part.
There had not been much sleep for me at the power plant. The hum of the diesel generators had provided bland background music as I ruminated over the scant information I had about Paul Kelliher and his death. One thing was certain: he was not studying iguanas. There was not one indication in his belongings that he was doing any biology fieldwork—no photographs, no field notes, no books on iguanas or biology. He was doing something that had him, and maybe the person who killed him, digging holes all over Spanish Camp. And keeping coded notes. And carrying weapons and maps with Xs on them. It had to be treasure hunting.
Paul Kelliher was certainly not the first to arrive on Anegada in search of buried treasure. Every year or two a single hunter or a group would arrive, hurrying off the Bomba Charger, the fast ferry from Road Town, with metal detectors, shovels, maps, and unwarranted optimism. After a week of digging in the sun and heat, they would make the return ferry trip, exhausted, sunburned, and disappointed. Several pirates, including Captain Bone and Black Sam Bellamy, were said to have buried Spanish gold and silver inland from the north shore beaches, so the quest for treasure was not entirely misplaced. If Paul Kelliher had been onto something involving treasure, there was one man on Anegada who might have an idea what that something was, so that was where I decided to begin.
* * *
Wendell George was one of the few residents of Anegada who was not born here. Wendell, an Antiguan, had set up a restaurant on the far western side of the island at Pomato Point when I was still a small child, bringing a mistress, and a penchant for privacy, with him. He presumably chose the isolation of Anegada and Pomato Point to make it difficult for his wife to chase him down.
It must have worked because no wife ever appeared. Wendell’s willowy mistress, whose name nobody knew and whom everyone privately called “the Mistress,” cooked wondrous meals of conch stew, pumpkin soup, fungee, and ducana for him and the very occasional patrons of the Pomato Point Restaurant. She never spoke to anyone but Wendell, never went to The Settlement, and always wore a pensive smile. For his part in the business, Wendell took food orders, ran the cash register, and otherwise dealt with the public with the disapproving demeanor of a Catholic school nun reprimanding an unruly child.
Wendell also hunted treasure. One of the rooms of the Pomato Point Restaurant was what he called his museum, a collection of bottles, small coins, grapeshot, broken plates, and buttons he had found while searching the island for Bone’s and Bellamy’s plunder. The museum was supposed to be a tourist draw for the restaurant, but the place was so out of the way it was empty most nights. Still, Wendell appeared to prosper, dressing well and importing a new Toyota Land Cruiser from San Juan every other year. Speculation in The Settlement was that not all of Wendell’s finds made their way to his museum, with the best being disposed of on yearly trips he took to Miami.
The Mistress was sweeping sand from the green and black glazed tiles of the stoop when I drove into the sandpit that passed for a parking lot at the Pomato Point Restaurant. She smiled warmly at me and disappeared inside before I could get out of the Land Rover. A dour Wendell emerged a second later, blinking in the white morning sun. My greeting to him was acknowledged only with a nod. I decided to break the ice with the “T” word.
“Wendell, I have come to talk with you about treasure.”
Wendell’s entire body stiffened. Perspiration beaded on his forehead and above his pencil-thin mustache. His eyes betrayed a disturbingly sexual mix of greed and pleasure to their innermost depth. Then, after a moment, he regained his composure and resumed his poker face.
“What about treasure?” He was as coy as a pawnbroker.
“I take it you heard about the man killed at Spanish Camp.”
“I’ve heard. It’s all over the island. The iguana professor. What does that have to do with treasure?” Wendell focused like a laser on the important topic, dead man be damned.
“I think he was hunting treasure. I think that may have something to do with his death,” I said.
“What makes you think he was hunting treasure?” God forbid we get off topic.
“His tent had a good number of excavations around it. All waist deep, and all left open after they were dug, like he didn’t find what he was digging for and was in a hurry to mov
e on to the next place. Judging by the number of holes, he had to have been digging for a month or two at least.”
“Just because a man digs holes doesn’t mean he’s digging for treasure. Maybe it was something to do with his iguana research.” Wendell pretended to play devil’s advocate, but he sensed there was more. He was barely able to contain himself.
This was so easy, it was almost fun. I cast the bait. “He also had some marked-up maps, a drawing, and a notebook that seems to be written in code.”
Wendell smiled, a grudging, closed-lipped smile that showed no teeth and might have been mistaken for a sneer on a happier individual. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile. Maybe it was the first time he had ever smiled. “I could take a look at those if you want some help,” he offered.
I went to the Land Rover and brought out the maps, drawing, and notebook. We moved to a table in the cool interior of the restaurant. Wendell crooked a finger in the general direction of the kitchen. A minute later, the Mistress materialized with a tray holding two glasses and an iced pitcher of guava juice. She disappeared before I could get out a thank-you.
Wendell spread the two maps and the legal-sheet drawing on the table, weighting the edges of the maps with silverware. He pondered them for a few seconds before he spoke.
“Well, we’ve both seen the ’77 survey map a hundred times, but I don’t have a clue about the pencil markings on it. I have seen copies of the Schomburgk map, and I saw the original at the Royal Geographical Society five years ago when I visited London. It took some persuasion to get a look at it but the original told me nothing that a decent photocopy could not. As far as I know, it is the only map showing Spanish Camp, even though everyone on Anegada seems to know where it is.”
Wendell placed a stubby finger on the drawing. “This drawing looks like the pond and shoreline by Spanish Camp, but it also could be a rough sketch of the area between the beach and any of the ponds on Anegada. No way to tell from the thing. There is just not enough detail, no landmarks, no compass rose, and no map key or writings, other than the word ‘pond.’ You know it’s not very old, just from the paper.
“Is the drawing, or the drawing together with the maps, a treasure map?” Wendell stated the question for himself. “Hell, I’ve been to libraries and archives in London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Madrid, poring over their contents for days, and none of them contained an honest-to-goodness treasure map. If you hid treasure, why make a map that might fall into someone else’s hands and allow them to find it? Just remember the landmarks and don’t tell anyone. There is no such thing as a treasure map.”
Wendell paused and leaned in to me conspiratorially. “Besides, I’ve been all over Spanish Camp with a metal detector. There is nothing to find there. No one ever stayed there, not Columbus and not any pirate. There is no harbor and no protection from storm swell. Bones Bight and Windlass Bight are where any treasure should be on Anegada. That’s the area where Bone and Bellamy had their hideouts. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
Wendell shifted his attention.”Can I have a look at that notebook?”
I passed the notebook to him. He flipped through every page of it, slowly. After half an hour, he leaned back and said, “I haven’t a clue what it means. It certainly seems to be written in a code, probably not difficult to break but not like what I have seen when it comes to codes from the buccaneer days. The old Spanish and Portuguese coded navigational logs I reviewed in archives were extremely simple by modern standards. Usually there was a key or codebook that matched a random letter, number, or symbol to the actual letter intended. You decoded by having the code key.
“What you have here doesn’t seem to be a simple keyed code because of the frequency of the more common letters, like ‘e,’ ‘t,’ and ‘a.’ If it were a keyed code, the frequency of the letters substituted for ‘e,’ ‘t’ and ‘a’ would be greater than that of ‘e,’ ‘t,’ or ‘a.’ That isn’t the case. It might be some other type of substitution code that is still fairly simple, but with no key needed to decode a message. A classic form is a Caesar shift, where you replace one letter with another a fixed number of places away in the alphabet. For example, shift each letter by three and ‘C-A-T’ becomes ‘F-D-W’ in code. Caesar shifts were used as far back as the Roman Empire. Play with a Caesar shift long enough and you will eventually work it out. But most likely it is a rail fence.”
“A rail fence?” I asked.
“Yes. Take the words you want to encode and write every other letter one line down. ‘RAIL FENCE’ becomes…” Wendell pulled a pen from his pocket and jotted on a paper napkin:
R I F N E
A L E C
“Then recombine along the rows and your code message is RIFNE + ALEC = RIFNEALEC. A rail fence code in its most basic form is very easily broken, but it can be combined with dead rows of letters and numbers between the rows formed by the real message to make it more difficult. Add a row of random letters and numbers to the ‘RAIL FENCE’ message like so:”
R I F N E
7 Q N 3 Z
A L E C
“Then it becomes RIFNE + 7QN3Z + ALEC = RIFNE7QN3ZALEC. If you do not know the number of letters and numbers in each dead row and the number of dead rows in the message, it can be quite difficult to decipher without a computer program designed for code breaking. The good news about this code is that it is all letters and numbers, with no symbols. That should make breaking it a little easier.”
“How easy is easier?” I asked. I was fast altering my definition of “easy.” It used to be as easy as pie; as easy as falling off a log; as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Now “easy” meant grinding away deciphering pages of seemingly random letters and numbers for who knows how long.
“Probably weeks if you had code-breaking experience and devoted full time to it.” Wendell’s enthusiasm over access to the notebook visibly waned as he said the words. The magnitude of the task hit home for me when he did not even volunteer to attempt it.
The Mistress returned, clearing the table with downcast eyes. I gathered the maps, drawing, and notebook. “Thanks, Wendell. You have been of great assistance.”
The light of greed dimming in his eyes, Wendell shrugged.
Chapter Eight
The first mile of the road from Pomato Point to The Settlement sets the island standard for disrepair. As I crawled the Land Rover along from pothole to pothole, I mulled over what I had learned from Wendell.
The two maps were of little help. The drawing was crude and generic. The key to what Paul Kelliher was doing at Spanish Camp, if there was a key, lay in the coded text of the notebook. The code had to be broken.
There was a chance of accomplishing this myself, I supposed, but I had no code-breaking experience and, as far as I knew, no particular flair for such a task. Sending the notebook to RVIPF headquarters with my recommendation for decoding would guarantee its relegation to the immobile heap I was sure existed on Rollie Stoutt’s desk. Asking Pamela Pickering for help would devolve into a dispute about who had authority over whom. Besides, she was such a vacant cow that the task would never be completed if she deigned to take it on.
At the roundabout near Setting Point, the weirdly logical solution to my need for code-breaking assistance manifested itself in the form of Anthony Wedderburn. De Rasta was smoking a comically large fatty of shag as he strolled in the direction of The Settlement. I pulled over to offer a ride and he climbed into the passenger seat, enveloped in an acrid cloud of homegrown-tobacco smoke.
“Good day, Teddy. Would you care for a hit?” Anthony said, extending the business end of the fatty toward me. “This is my best crop in a couple of years. Once I get it properly dried and aged, it will rival the finest our Cuban neighbors have to offer.”
De Rasta grew his shag in a small patch near Saltheap Point, watering the yellow-leafed plants with rainwater caught in a limestone sinkhole. I once made the mistake of trying a puff of his homegrown. The taste was somewhere between compost and wet-
dog-on-fire. On this day, I respectfully declined.
Anthony slouched back against the seat, took a big drag, and peered at me through bloodshot eyes.
“If it is not too presumptuous, old man, you look as though you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.” De Rasta’s tone was one of genuine concern.
“It’s Professor Kelliher’s murder, Anthony. Everywhere I turn I find more questions than answers. I can’t even manage to locate his next of kin.” I gave a brief description of my failures to date, ending with the morning’s visit to Wendell George and the coded notebook. De Rasta either nodded sympathetically or was bouncing from the washboard road. I couldn’t tell which.
“I can help you with the notebook,” De Rasta said cheerfully. “Back in my other life I was a bit of a lonely boy, and I used to play with codes and such. Some said I had a knack for it, especially codes based on words. I used to do the Times jumbo every day in ink, timed with a stopwatch. My best time was twenty-seven minutes, forty-two seconds. That is less than sixteen seconds per clue, if that is of interest to you.”
The voice inside me questioned whether it was prudent to turn my best clue to Professor Kelliher’s identity over to this perpetually buzzed member of the aristocracy. After a brief hesitation, I decided to do it. There really were no other viable alternatives, and after all, his family had ruled the mother country for a millennium or more. That alone spoke volumes about their native intelligence and capacity for intrigue.
“You’re hired,” I said, “but the pay’s a bit thin.”