Читать книгу Domino Island: The unpublished thriller by the master of the genre - Desmond Bagley, Desmond Bagley - Страница 10

My hotel in San Martin grandly called itself the Royal Caribbean. It was new, which just goes to show that there is no one more royalist than a good republican. The foyer was lined with one-armed bandits which, on inspection, proved to be fuelled by silver dollars. All around could be heard the cadences of American speech from the guests and the slurred English of the Campanillans who worked there.

On my way in from Benning, the island’s international airport, two things had struck me: the smell of prosperity and the oppression of the heat. Both were almost tangible. San Martin, a clean and well-scrubbed town, was fringed on the skyline with cranes as new high-rise buildings went up. The traffic in the streets was heavy – flashy American cars driving incongruously on the left, British-style. The shops in the main streets were opulent and the crowds thronging the pavements were, on the whole, well-dressed. As for the heat, it had hit me like a wall as soon as I stepped off the plane. Even at this time of year, it was enough to make a pallid Englishman gasp.

I checked in at the hotel, showered off the stickiness, and went down again to sniff some more atmosphere. On the way out I stopped at the desk, and asked, ‘I suppose you have a newspaper here?’

‘Yes, sir; the Chronicle. You can buy a copy at the news stand there.’

‘Where is the Chronicle office?’

‘Cardew Street, sir. Two blocks along and turn right.’

There is nothing like reading the local paper for picking up a quick feel of a place. A newspaper is a tribal noticeboard which tells you what people are doing and, to a certain extent, thinking and saying. I’m a behaviourist myself and take more notice of what people do rather than what they say. The old saw ‘actions speak louder than words’ is truer than most proverbs, and I wanted to find out what people had been doing round about the time Salton had died.

I walked along the street in the hot sun and stopped at the first men’s outfitters I came to. I bought a light, linen suit more in tune with the climate than the one I was wearing, and paid for it by credit card, which was accepted without question. I wore the new suit and asked that the old one be sent to the hotel. Then I carried on towards the Chronicle office.

It looked and smelled like newspaper offices all over the world, a composite of library paste, newsprint, ink and suppressed tension. A press rumbled somewhere in the bowels of the building. When I asked to see the back file for the previous month, I was shown into a glass-walled office and seated in front of a scarred deal table. Presently the file was put before me. On its front was a pasted notice promising unimaginable punishments for anyone criminal enough to clip items from the pages.

I opened it and took a random sampling. Prices were high generally and food prices exceptionally so. The price of housing made me blink a little. Cigarettes, liquor and petrol were cheaper than in England but clothing was more expensive. That I already knew; the cost of my linen suit had been damn near the Savile Row level and the quality not a tenth as good.

I turned to the employment columns and did a quick rundown of wage levels. What I found didn’t look good: while prices rose above North American levels, wages were lower than European, which didn’t leave much scope for gracious living on the part of the working populace.

This was reflected in the political pages. It seemed there was an election coming up in a month or so and the government party appeared beleaguered. A small extreme left-wing party made up for shortage of numbers by a lot of noise, and a larger and more central opposition party threatened reform when it came to power. Meanwhile the Prime Minister made soothing sounds and concessions.

Pretty soon the name of Salton popped up, making a pugnacious speech against the ruling party:

‘This toadying government must stop licking the boots of foreigners for the sake of private profit. There must be an end to cheap concessions by which foreign gangsters can make their fortunes while our schools are understaffed. There must be an end to the pernicious system whereby foreign companies can filter untold millions of dollars through our country at no cost to themselves, while our own hospitals are neglected. There must be an end to the continual rise in prices at a time when the wage structure is depressed. I promise the Prime Minister that he will know the true mind of Campanilla during the forthcoming election, despite the activities of his hired bully boys.’

Evidently Salton had caught it from both sides. The Prime Minster, the Honourable Walden P. Conyers, responded smoothly: ‘It has been brought to my notice by the Department of Immigration that Mr Salton has not given up his American citizenship. He would be advised to do so before complaining about those enlightened foreign companies who have done so much to bring prosperity to this island.’

On the other side, a left-winger snarled acidly about two-faced millionaires who wrote wishy-washy liberal speeches while sipping martinis on the terraces of their expensive villas as their well-paid overseers were grinding the faces of the native poor. That sounded familiar, as did the call for instant revolution by the down-trodden proletariat.

I flicked through some more recent editions and came to a big splash story, emblazoned with a full-page picture of Salton. He must have been a really big wheel for his death to have made the commotion it did. The first thing I felt was the sense of shock that permeated the initial accounts; it seemed as though the reporter couldn’t really believe what he was writing. Then the accusations began to fly, each wilder than the last, while riots broke out on the streets and the police had their hands full.

It was hard to reconcile these accounts of civil unrest with the well-oiled gentility I’d seen outside on Cardew Street, but I soon found out the reason. The inquest had quietened things down considerably and the rioting stopped on the day that Dr Winstanley stood in the witness box and announced that Salton had died of natural causes. When asked if he was sure about that, he replied stiffly that he had performed the post-mortem examination himself and he was quite certain.

Mrs Salton gave evidence that her husband had had heart trouble six months earlier. This was corroborated by Dr Collins, his personal physician. When Mrs Salton was asked if her husband habitually went out by himself in a small dinghy, she replied that after his heart attack she had asked him not to continue this practice, but that he had not given up sailing alone.

The verdict, as Jolly had informed me back in London, was death by natural causes.

Salton’s funeral was attended by all the island dignitaries and a few thousand of the common people. Conyers made a speech, sickening in its hypocrisy, in which he mourned the loss of a noble fellow-countryman. After that, Salton pretty much dropped out of the news except for an occasional reference, usually in the financial pages, concerning the activities of his companies. No one can be forgotten quicker than a dead man.

I turned back to the obituary and was making a few notes when I became aware that someone had come into the room. I looked up and saw a podgy, balding man watching me intently. He blinked rapidly behind thick-rimmed glasses and said, ‘Interesting reading?’

‘For those who find it interesting,’ I said. A tautology is a good way of evading an issue; that’s something I’ve learned from listening to too many politicians.

‘You’re an off-islander,’ he said abruptly. ‘You’ve not been here long.’

I leaned back in the chair. ‘How do you know?’

‘No tan. Just out from England?’

I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. I’m interested in local conditions.’

‘By reading about a dead man?’ His voice was flat but the irony was not lost. ‘Taking notes, too.’

‘Is it illegal?’

He suddenly smiled. ‘I guess not. My name’s Jackson.’ He waved his hand. ‘I get into the habit of asking too many questions. I work here.’

‘A reporter?’

‘Sort of.’ He gestured at Salton’s obituary. ‘I wrote that.’

‘You write well,’ I said politely.

‘You’re a liar,’ said Jackson without rancour. ‘If I did I wouldn’t be in this crummy place. What’s the interest in Salton?’

‘You do ask questions,’ I said.

Unapologetically he said, ‘It’s my job. You don’t have to answer. I can find out another way if I have to.’

‘You didn’t come in by accident and find me here.’

He grinned. ‘Mary Josephine tipped me off. The girl at the desk. We like to know who checks our files. It’s routine.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes it even pays off. Not often, though.’

All that was quite possibly true. I said cautiously, ‘Well, Mr Jackson, if you were interested in the future of the late Mr Salton’s companies, wouldn’t you be interested in knowing how he died?’

‘I guess so.’ He looked at my notebook. ‘You don’t have to take notes. I’ll give you a copy of anything you want.’

‘In exchange for what?’

‘No strings,’ he said. ‘It’s in the public domain. But if you turn anything up – anything unusual – I’d be glad to know.’

I smiled at him. ‘I don’t think my principals would like publicity. Is anything unusual likely to turn up?’

Jackson shrugged. ‘If a guy turns over enough stones he’s sure to find something nasty some place.’

‘And you think there’s something nasty to be found by looking under Mr Salton’s stones. That’s very interesting. What sort of a man was Salton?’

‘No worse than any other son-of-a-bitch.’

My eyebrows rose. ‘You didn’t like him?’

‘He was a gold-plated bastard.’

I glanced down at the obituary. ‘You’re a better writer than you think, Mr Jackson. It doesn’t show here.’

‘Company policy,’ said Jackson. ‘Mrs Salton owns the Chronicle.’

That was a new one on me but I didn’t let him know that. I said, ‘If you talk like this to strangers you’re not likely to be on the payroll much longer. How do you know I’m not a friend of Mrs Salton’s?’

‘You’re not her friend,’ said Jackson. ‘You’re an insurance investigator. We’ve been expecting you to show up, Mr Ogilvie.’

He had the wrong man but the right occupation and I wondered how that had come about. I decided to let him have his cheap triumph for the time being and said evenly, ‘So?’

‘So she’s sticking your people for a lot of dough. You wouldn’t be human if you admitted to liking her for it.’

I looked down at the obituary. ‘Granting there’s a certain amount of bias here, Salton still doesn’t measure up to your personal description of him. What about the two hospitals he built, the university foundation, the low-cost housing? Those are facts.’

‘Sure,’ said Jackson. ‘He’s been buying votes. Was successful at it, too. A very popular guy. You should have seen his funeral.’

‘I’ve seen the photographs,’ I said.

‘That cheap housing was a surefire vote-catcher.’ Jackson leaned forward and rested his hands on the table. ‘Have you any idea of the cost of housing on this island? You’ll be damned lucky to get away with £10 a square foot. So he cut a lot of corners – he built cheap and he built nasty and he didn’t sell a single goddamn house he built.’

‘I don’t understand. If he didn’t sell any houses, where did he make his profit?’ I thought of Costello and the three millions and wondered if his ears were burning.

‘He didn’t,’ said Jackson. ‘He was losing like crazy. He rented those houses and the return was completely uneconomic. But it gave him a solid vote.’

‘He must have been rich,’ I commented. ‘That’s an expensive route to politics.’

‘He had a lot of dough,’ conceded Jackson. ‘But not that much. Mr Black was behind him with a slush fund.’

I sighed. ‘And who is Mr Black?’

Jackson stared at me. ‘Don’t you know anything about what goes on here? You’d better learn fast. Gerry Negrini is Mr Big in the casino crowd.’

‘Negrini?’

‘Negrini – Mr Black, get it?’

‘Oh, I see. But where do casinos come into it?’

‘Negrini represents certain New York and Chicago interests who are bucking Las Vegas and Reno.’

I still couldn’t see the connection. ‘But why should he support a liberal like Salton?’ I tapped the file. ‘I’ve read Salton’s speeches.’

‘You need a crash course in local politics,’ said Jackson earnestly. He was getting into his stride, teaching this dumb foreigner how things worked around here, and I wasn’t about to stop the flow. ‘Look, Mr Ogilvie, this island is wide open and a buck moves faster here than any other place in the world. Mr Black and his boys have got the whole thing sewn up – they’ve put Campanilla on the map for the jet set and all the well-heeled suckers who go for gambling.’

He hesitated. There was evidently more to come.

‘But there’s another angle. The bankers and the big corporations have also got it made here, and they don’t like gambling and the associations that go with it. They don’t want the off-shore trust funds confused with the spin of a roulette wheel. That’s bad for business.’

‘I can see their point.’

‘So they made sure they had their own man – Conyers. He was their boy, and he had his instructions: get the election out of the way and then crack down on the gambling. Mr Black had to pick an opposition leader and he picked Salton.’

‘Salton? But he’d only been back on the island five minutes.’

Jackson shrugged. ‘You can make a lot of noise in five minutes, Mr Ogilvie. Especially with someone like that behind you.’

‘So the cheap housing was just an expensive red herring.’

‘Make no mistake about it: if Salton had lived he’d almost certainly have been the next Prime Minister.’ Jackson waved airily at the file. ‘But all that flapdoodle in his speeches was for the suckers. You can bet that as soon as he got into power those house rents would have been raised pretty swiftly.’

He was on a roll so I kept up the masquerade. ‘I’ve been reading the account of the inquest. Do you believe Salton died of natural causes?’

Jackson sat down opposite me at the table and leaned back: he looked like he was settling in for the duration. ‘Winstanley is a doddering old fool at the best of times but even if he was the best pathologist in the world I doubt he could have made much of what was left of Salton.’ He grimaced. ‘I saw the body when he was brought in.’

‘He’d been out there for days, hadn’t he? Wasn’t anyone looking for him? Didn’t Mrs Salton raise the alarm?’

‘Which of those questions would you like me to answer?’ said Jackson. There was more than a hint of condescension in his voice. ‘No. The first anyone knew about it was when the body was found.’ He stared at me. ‘Don’t you find that strange?’

‘She must have had an explanation that was acceptable to the police.’

‘The police?’ Jackson snorted. ‘They’re in Conyers’s pocket, from Commissioner Barstow down to the last man on the beat.’

‘That’s an interesting take, Mr Jackson. In fact, you’ve raised a lot of interesting points.’

‘Glad to be of help, Mr Ogilvie,’ he said genially. ‘You’ll be visiting Mrs Salton?’

‘Probably tomorrow.’

‘You’d better telephone first,’ he advised. ‘No one gets to El Cerco without an invitation.’

‘Have you got a telephone directory?’

He grinned. ‘You won’t find the number in there. It’s unlisted.’ He picked up my notebook and scribbled in it. ‘That’ll find her.’

As I stood up to go, I asked casually, ‘How did you know I was Ogilvie?’

‘I have a pipeline into the Department of Immigration at the airport. I knew that Western and Continental Insurance would be sending a man so I put out the word.’

So that was how Ogilvie had been tagged. ‘That’s all very well, but how did you know I was Ogilvie? It’s not tattooed on my forehead.’

‘Hell, I knew you’d be coming in here to check the files so I had Mary Josephine tip me off. Then there was this.’ He lifted my notebook and grinned at me. Stamped on its cover in gilt were the words Western and Continental Insurance Co. Ltd. ‘I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘You didn’t.’ I took the notebook from him and put it away.

Jackson heaved himself to his feet and said, ‘I’d be very much obliged if you let me know anything you turn up, Mr Ogilvie.’

‘I don’t think I will,’ I said. ‘You see, I told the truth when I said I was only interested in Mr Salton’s companies in a business way. I have no connection with this insurance company beyond having taken out a policy with them, and my name is not Ogilvie – it’s Kemp.’ I smiled. ‘The notebook was a handout. Western and Continental lash them out to all their clients.’

Jackson’s eyes flickered. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said flatly.

I took out my passport and handed it to him. William Kemp, business consultant. ‘But thanks for the tutorial. It was most interesting.’

Jackson seemed to have had the wind knocked out of him as I took back the passport and pocketed it. He said, ‘Hell, anyone can make a mistake – and you went along with it.’

I nodded. ‘I go along with most things as long as it suits me, Mr Jackson.’ I walked to the door and turned. ‘By the way, I will be seeing Mrs Salton tomorrow. I’ll give her your regards.’

‘Hey, Mr Kemp, you won’t tell her … I mean … you won’t repeat what I’ve said?’ He was shaken right down to his liver and obviously terrified of losing his job.

I smiled. ‘I’ll reserve judgement on that – as long as it suits me.’ I gave him a curt nod and walked out of the room, leaving a shocked man. I don’t know who he thought I was, but I reckoned I’d given him enough of a fright to keep his nose out of my affairs.

I went back to the Royal Caribbean and telephoned Ogilvie. It was a long time before he answered and when he did his voice was grumpy. ‘Kemp here,’ I said.

‘You’ve woken me up,’ he complained. ‘I’m dead on my feet.’

I knew how he felt. Air travel is tiring and my time sense was shot to pieces because of the transatlantic flight. ‘Just something for you to do tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Go to the Chronicle office in Cardew Street and ask to see the back issues for the last month. You’ll find a lot of interesting stuff about Salton.’

‘What’s the point if you’ve already done it?’

‘You’ll probably be contacted by a creep called Jackson. Don’t try to hide who you are, but if he asks about me you’re ignorant. Jackson is a bit hard to take, but disguise your finer feelings and get pally with him. He’ll like you better if he thinks you’re here to torpedo Mrs Salton’s claim.’

‘Well, aren’t we?’

‘Don’t be cynical,’ I said, and put down the telephone. If Jackson wanted to meet Ogilvie, who was I to stand in his way? Besides, there was always a chance his loose lips might give the company man something else we could work with.

I took out my notebook, checked the number Jackson had given me, and dialled. The call was answered immediately and a slurred Campanillan voice said, ‘The Salton residence.’

‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Salton,’ I said. ‘My name is Kemp.’

‘What would it be about?’

‘If she wants you to know she’ll tell you.’ I never have liked the nosy and over-protective underling.

There was a pause, some brief heavy breathing and then a rattle as the handset was laid down. Presently there was another rattle and a cool voice said, ‘Jill Salton speaking.’

‘My name is Kemp – William Kemp. Your uncle, Lord Hosmer, asked me to call and present his condolences.’ He hadn’t, but it made a good story.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come here?’

‘If that’s all right with you. I’m free tomorrow, if it’s convenient.’

‘Would the morning suit you? Say at eleven?’

‘That would be fine, Mrs Salton.’

‘Very well, I’ll expect you then. Good day, Mr Kemp.’ There was a click and the connection was cut.

I called down to reception and made arrangements for hiring a car, to be ready in front of the hotel at nine the following morning.

Then I got undressed and fell asleep as though I’d been sandbagged.