The Far Side of the Sun (45 page)

Cursing Hector Latcham.

He thought of the obeah curse he had wished on Hector. The hairbrush. The fine strands of brown hair from Hector’s head, and the power of Mama Keel’s magic. Could it destroy him? He grimaced at his own foolishness, but it was all he had left now.

That one small bead of hope.

‘Out!’

Flynn was under the window, watching the day drain out of the sky. The lights in his cell were so bright and so relentless that his eyes had to fight to focus on the subtle changes of colour outside that told him the passing of time.

‘Out!’

Flynn regarded the prison warden with distaste. ‘What now?’

‘You’re free to go.’

‘Is this a joke?’

‘No, man. You can walk out of here.’

Flynn headed straight for the door. ‘A free man?’

‘Yes. Collect your belongings, sign the form and get out of here.’ He was grinning, a big white-toothed grin.

‘What happened? Why now?’

‘Ah, it was your landlord. He thinks he made a big mistake.’

Flynn was running down the corridor.
Thank you, Mama Keel. I owe you.

Where was she?

Too late now for her to be at Portman Cay.

Hector’s office? It would be shut for the night.

Hector’s house?

He remembered the dark-haired wife asleep in the bed. She was probably at the house right now, waiting with her martini for her husband to finish his drinks in some bar with the Bay Street Boys. A normal day. No, she wasn’t likely to help him.

Who then?

Ella Sanford.

‘Mrs Sanford ain’t here.’

The maid in her white uniform was staring at Flynn with wide worried eyes, her hands fretting at each other.

‘Do you know where she is?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, I surely don’t.’

‘Do you have any idea where she went?’

‘I wish I did. She left real early this mornin’.’

‘Have you seen Miss Wyatt today?’

‘That young girl who came here before? No, sir, I ain’t.’ She clutched at the flimsy straw of hope. ‘You think they just out havin’ fun together somewhere, is that it?’

‘No,’ he said, as the image of Hector Latcham’s cold eyes rose in his mind. ‘I don’t think they’re having fun.’

Their mouths were parched. The heat was intense. The constant motion of the boat under her set Dodie’s teeth on edge, as it dipped and rolled with the waves. Only now that the light began to dwindle did she accept that Hector was not coming back. He was doing what he said he would – leaving them there to die on the boat.

Ella wasn’t good. There was a tightness to her face, and her hand was clenched in distress as if only just holding on by a thin thread of willpower. Her eyes looked bruised and had sunk deep in her thin face. Dodie tried to keep her talking but Ella had succumbed to the sounds in her own head and had no room for any voices except Dan Calder’s.

All during the long hot hours of the day spent in the belly of the boat Dodie had worked to escape, but it was hopeless. Their wrists were bloodied and pestered by fat hungry flies. The handcuffs were looped around the brass rail that bordered a shelf behind them and however hard she pulled and pushed, twisted and tugged, it refused to come adrift from the teak wall. Her efforts were tearing their wrists to shreds, though Ella never uttered a whimper.

Only once did she murmur, ‘Give up, Dodie. There’s no point.’

‘There is, Ella. It’s our only way out of here.’

Ella had let a faint smile spill out of her. ‘They are Dan’s handcuffs. They were in his pocket. It’s ironic that he died trying to save me but his own handcuffs will kill me.’ She was rocking back and forth on the bench. ‘Don’t you think?’

But Dodie was stern with her. ‘Concentrate on getting out.’

‘I’m frightened of living, Dodie. Not of dying. I’ve never had to live with this kind of loss because I’ve never felt this kind of love before. I am not strong like you.’ She brushed her fingers regretfully over Dodie’s bloody wrist. ‘I’m sorry, Dodie.’

‘Don’t, Ella. You are stronger than you think. We have to get out of here. I am not going to die here. Not in a stinking boat. Not while Flynn is still drawing breath.’

‘Dodie,’ Ella murmured, as she lay her head down on the table, ‘you deserve better.’

There was the sound of footsteps on deck. Dodie jerked awake. How long had she slept?

Minutes only. It was still light enough to see. The boat was rolling more under a rising wind and she could feel it pulling on its anchor. She nudged Ella.

‘He’s back.’

Ella blinked but her eyes were dull, as a figure clattered noisily down the ladder rungs and stumbled into the gloomy room with an oath.

‘Tilly!’ Ella exclaimed.

Dodie stared in disbelief. Relief swept through her and her fingers jittered with the sudden release of nerves.

‘Thank God,’ Ella whispered.

Dodie stood, her right arm in a spasm of fatigue. ‘Mrs Latcham, your husband has imprisoned us here and —’

Only then did she realise Tilly was drunk. She was weaving sideways as she walked, holding on to the wall.

‘Darlings,’ Tilly said as she eased herself on to the bench opposite them, ‘how absolutely vile. You look terrible.’

Dodie sat down again to be on the same level as Tilly, but she could sense this was not right. Tilly was too brittle, too accepting of their plight. She should have screamed in horror and rushed to the toolbox.

‘Mrs Latcham,’ Dodie spoke clearly and slowly, ‘please fetch a chisel or a hammer from —’

‘I’ve come to tell you something.’

Now Ella was aware of the oddness about her. ‘Tilly, please, this is serious.’

‘So is this.’

‘What is it, Mrs Latcham? Tell us quickly. Mrs Sanford needs attention.’

‘I came to tell you, Dodie,’ Tilly’s words were thick but her eyes were focused hard on Dodie’s, ‘that your friend, Mr Morrell, should not have been so damn stupid that night in our car. If he hadn’t refused to tell me where he’d emptied the gold from the wretched ivory box he was carrying, I wouldn’t have had to stab him.’

‘What? Tilly, no!’

‘Hector recognised what the ivory box was and I persuaded Morrell into our car but when he was so uncooperative about everything, I had to threaten him with a knife and… well, we struggled and… that was it.’

‘My God, Tilly,’ Ella gasped, ‘you must go to the police at once, tell them the truth. That it was an accident.’

Dodie put a hand on Ella. ‘Can’t you see? That’s what this is all about for Hector Latcham? Not just the land deal. It’s about protecting his wife.’

The boat creaked and lurched as the wind turned suddenly. Darkness in the islands fell fast and Dodie was certain that Tilly would want to leave quickly before the seas grew too rough for the rowboat.

‘Mrs Latcham,’ Dodie strove to keep her voice calm and reasonable, ‘Ella is right. You must go to the police. You can’t let Flynn Hudson hang for a crime you committed. You have to tell them.’

‘My dear Miss Wyatt, why on earth would I do that?’

This woman wants me to die.

The realisation sent a shiver of revulsion through her and she glanced at Ella to see if she realised it too, but saw no signs.

‘So why,’ Dodie asked, ‘did you save me so dramatically from kidnap in the car in Nassau if…⁠’ She halted. Instinctively she drew back from the table, further away from the lawyer’s wife, as if she were contagious. ‘Of course, I should have realised. You set it up in the first place, didn’t you, so that you could come riding in to save me.’

The scarlet slash of a mouth smiled, pleased with itself. ‘Cunning, wasn’t it? I hoped you would confide in me and tell me what dirty little secrets you know about where the gold is.’ She shrugged. ‘It almost worked.’ She popped open her leather bag, removed a cigarette case and lit a Dunhill for herself. The hand that held the lighter was rock steady. She exhaled a plume of smoke that hung from the beams overhead like old cobwebs in the stagnant air.

‘The foolish man. He should have cooperated.’

Dodie did not want to hear Morrell called a foolish man.

Tilly shook her head with frustration. ‘He’d buried the coins somewhere on Sir Harry’s estate, but he wouldn’t reveal where.’

Dodie pictured the big bear of a man, Johnnie Morrell, bargaining desperately for his life, with a knife doing the arguing for the Latchams. It made her want to seize this preened and pampered woman by the throat.

‘That is why,’ Tilly confided in a sudden rush of intimacy, ‘Sir Harry caught us digging in his grounds the other night and everything turned nasty.’

Ella stared at her, aghast. ‘You? Are you saying you are the one who shot Sir Harry?’

‘Oh Ella, it wasn’t meant to happen.’

‘Tilly!’

‘Well, the bloody man was going to hand us over to the police and I had to stop him. Poor old Hector had the devil’s own job covering it all up in that ghastly storm, what with Christie there as well. And he even scattered those stupid feathers on the body, for heaven’s sake.’

A low visceral moan issued from Ella and she rose menacingly to her feet.

‘It was you. All this was because of you. You’re the reason Dan is dead on that beach out there. You. Not Hector.’

‘How was I to know the stupid detective would get in the way, darling? That’s why I’ve come all the way out here to see you. I wanted to explain. I didn’t intend for him to die.’ She pulled a face at Ella. ‘Anyway we’ve been good friends, you and I, and I wanted to say goodbye.’

‘You are not my friend.’

‘Darling, don’t be so rude. Hector was right. He told me not to come, but I insisted. He was even willing to row me out, but I wouldn’t let him. This moment is between just you and me, darling.’ She blew a kiss to Ella.

Ella tried to seize Tilly, one-handed across the table, but despite the drink inside her, Tilly was faster. She withdrew a tiny pearl-handled pistol from her bag and flashed it in Ella’s face.

‘My darling girl, don’t make me.’

Dodie leapt to her feet. ‘Mrs Latcham, it’ll be dark soon. Fetch the tools immediately, please. We need to get out of here. Or do you have the key to the cuffs?’

Beside her, Ella was shaking with fury.

‘No, I don’t have the key, I’m afraid. Such a shame. But I think I’ll give the tools a miss too.’ She looked from Ella’s white face to Dodie’s, then at the fading light. Beneath them the boat rocked warningly. ‘I shall say goodbye to you, dear ladies.’

It was the work of a moment for Dodie. A quick smack with her free hand on the side of the gun. Tilly was not expecting it from Dodie, her eyes were watching Ella. Dodie had been calm and respectful, no threat, no smacker of guns, but Tilly was wrong. The pistol flew out of her hand on to the table, where Ella seized it in her right hand and aimed it straight at Tilly.

For ten seconds neither moved. But neither of them would back down. Then Tilly threw herself forward, hands reaching for the pistol.

‘Give me the gun!’

Ella pulled the trigger. The noise of the shot exploded in the small space and gulls shrieked outside as they rose in alarm from their roosts on the yacht’s sleek deck. Tilly whimpered. A small sound. Nothing more. Blood oozed out in a dark burgundy stain across the stomach of her pale crepe dress and Tilly stared at it with surprise.

‘Mrs Latcham, listen to me.’ Dodie spoke loudly to gain her attention. ‘We’ll help you. But you have to get something to free us.’

But Tilly continued to frown, bemused at the stain on her dress, then with a jerk she set herself in motion and staggered up the companionway ladder. Minutes later they heard the slap of oars on the water.

The wind was rising.

Dodie held the gun steady. She released her breath and pulled the trigger. The varnished teak of the boat’s wall splintered and the end of the brass rail broke away, so that they could slide the handcuffs down it and off the end.

‘Freedom!’ Dodie said and shook the burning muscles of her arm. ‘Of a kind, anyway.’

They were still attached to each other. It was dark inside the boat now, so she couldn’t see Ella’s expression clearly, but she had sensed a deadness in her ever since she’d turned the gun on the woman who had been her friend.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Dodie urged.

‘Do you think she’ll be all right?’

‘Of course she will. She’ll get to the hospital and they’ll patch her up. She was all right enough to row a boat, so it can’t be so bad.’ But she heard Ella’s murmur of doubt and it echoed what lay hidden behind her own words. They had both seen Tilly’s face when the bullet hit her.

‘Now,’ Dodie said firmly, ‘let’s go. Before they come back.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can, Ella.’

It was dark on deck. The vast stretch of blackness below them pitched and rolled, as the ocean wheeled around the boat and rumbled underneath them. They could hear its boom and smell its salty breath. Out on deck the air was sharp and sweet after the heat below, but the moon had not yet risen and the stars were no more than faint pinpricks in the immense sweep of darkness above them.