Читать книгу Domino Island: The unpublished thriller by the master of the genre - Desmond Bagley, Desmond Bagley - Страница 13

Haslam lived in a neat little house next to the airstrip. He was a tall, spare Canadian with not enough meat on his bones for his height. His eyes were a faded blue, networked around with the wrinkles of middle age, so that he gave the impression of being worried about something. Maybe he was.

His wife was a frizzy blonde, pouchy under the eyes and burnt nearly black from too much sun so that her hair made a startling contrast to her leathery skin. And she showed a lot of skin.

I found them sitting beside a small swimming pool behind the house. Haslam stood up as I approached. ‘Mr Kemp?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Mrs Salton said you’d be coming. She told me to tell you anything you want to know.’

Haslam’s wife looked up at me and indicated a jug on the deck table beside her. ‘Drink, Mr Kemp? Margarita.’

I felt the mid-afternoon sun searing my scalp and the roof of my mouth was dry. ‘It would be appreciated.’

She got to her feet. ‘I’ll go get a glass while you talk business with Jim. Then we can all have another drink.’

She appeared to have had too many already – the perils of a sedentary life in paradise, perhaps. I said, ‘I’ll be wanting to speak to you, too, Mrs Haslam.’

She lifted her eyebrows. ‘Okay. Be back soon.’ She tottered unsteadily towards the house.

I turned to Haslam and took the cane chair he indicated. ‘Suppose you tell me everything that happened just before Mr Salton died.’

He shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you any more than I’ve told already.’

‘Humour me,’ I said. ‘I’m a stranger round here.’

So he told me, and there was nothing in his account that was any different from that of Mrs Salton. While he was speaking, his wife came back with a glass and a refilled jug, sat by the pool and poured me a drink, as well as one for herself. Haslam was not drinking. I sipped my margarita while listening to him and discovered that Mrs Haslam was uncomfortably heavy with the tequila.

At last he finished. ‘That’s all I know, Mr Kemp.’

From the airstrip came the sudden howl of a jet engine winding up. I said, ‘What’s happening over there?’

‘Les Philips is testing the engines. I’m taking her up this afternoon.’

‘Oh, where are you going?’

‘No place. Just around. There are a lot of moving parts in an airplane, Mr Kemp, and if they’re left alone they get sticky. An airplane needs exercise, same as a man. She’s not been up since … since we came back from the States.’

‘How long will you be gone?’

‘Maybe an hour.’

I said, ‘I wanted to look at the plane. Maybe I’ll come with you.’

He hesitated. ‘That’s all right with me, but maybe I’d better check with Mrs Salton.’ He broke into an embarrassed laugh. ‘It’s her airplane. I’m just the hired driver.’

‘Well, why don’t you ask her if it’s all right?’

‘Sure, I’ll do that.’ He got up and walked towards the house.

Mrs Haslam reached for the jug and refilled her glass. ‘You wanna ask me somethin’?’ She was drinking too fast and her voice was slurred.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘On the day that Mrs Salton came up here to ask if you’d seen her husband, you told her that your husband and Mr Salton had gone into the plane and then the plane took off. Isn’t that what you said?’

She looked at me owlishly. ‘Sure, that’s what I said.’

‘But it wasn’t so. Why did you say it?’

‘It was so, too. You making me a liar, Mr Kemp?’

‘I’m just trying to get things straightened out,’ I said.

‘It happened like I said. Mr Salton got into the airplane with Jim. The plane took off.’ She looked up. ‘But I wasn’t looking at that airplane the whole damn time.’

I said carefully, ‘You mean that Mr Salton might have left the aircraft without you seeing him, before it took off?’

‘Sure.’ She drank from her glass and a dribble of liquid ran from the corner of her mouth down her chin. She dabbed it with the back of a paw.

‘But when it became clear that Mr Salton was missing, didn’t it occur to you to tell someone?’

She shook her head muzzily. ‘I didn’t know David Salton was missing. And if Mrs Salton thought he was, then she kept her troubles to herself.’

That fitted. I couldn’t see Mrs Salton confiding in a woman like this, the addled wife of her husband’s employee. Haslam called from the house. I said, ‘Excuse me,’ to Mrs Haslam and went across.

‘Mrs Salton would like to talk with you,’ he said, and led me inside the house to the telephone.

I picked it up. ‘Kemp here.’

Her voice was cool and pleasant. ‘After your flight would you like to come back to the house and make use of the pool?’

‘That would be very nice.’ I paused. ‘I have no trunks with me.’

She sounded amused. ‘I think we can find something for you. In about an hour, then.’

I put down the telephone and went back to Haslam. ‘Would you like to go right away?’ he asked.

‘If you’re ready,’ I said.

He nodded abruptly and went back to the pool. He had a few words with his wife and then came back. I fell into step with him and we walked across the airstrip towards the distant hangar. He was silent and seemed to be brooding about something. At last he said, ‘Bette … my wife … She’s not usually like that. It’s just that she’s upset.’

‘About Mr Salton?’

He shrugged. ‘In a way. She’s worried about me.’

‘I don’t see that you can be blamed for anything,’ I said.

Haslam stopped in mid-stride and turned to me. ‘It’s not that. She’s worried about my job. Mrs Salton doesn’t use the airplane much – it was his baby – and Bette thinks I may be out of a job pretty soon. She may be right, at that.’

‘Did you like working for Mr Salton?’

‘Hell, yes. He was a real nice guy. Very considerate, not like some bosses I’ve had. Wherever we went – and we went to some weird places – he always saw that the aircrew were okay before he went about his business.’

We began to walk again, and I said, ‘How many in the crew?’

‘There’s me as pilot, and Les Philips. He’s the engineer and does the routine ground servicing but he has his pilot’s ticket too, so he comes along as co-pilot. I do the navigating. House servants are on board as stewards – one or two, depending on the number of passengers. And there was usually Mr Salton’s secretary.’

‘Who was?’

‘Mrs Forsyth.’

‘Is she around here now?’

Haslam shook his head. ‘She used to live here at El Cerco but she’s now working with Mr Idle in San Martin.’

I thought of the rambling house on the island in the lagoon. ‘Does Mrs Salton now live entirely alone in the house? I mean, apart from servants.’

Haslam looked at me consideringly for a moment, then said briefly, ‘I wouldn’t know.’

We’d been walking for several minutes and it suddenly struck me that this was an indecently large airstrip to accommodate a relatively small plane. I asked Haslam about it.

‘I thought the same thing when I first came here. What you have to remember is that it wasn’t built by Mr Salton. The strip predates that lagoon house by many years.’

That surprised me. The northern tip of the island was remote by any standards, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would put a random airstrip – especially one as big as this – so far away from the island’s residential centres.

‘It was actually built by you Brits in the war,’ said Haslam. ‘Transport station for most of the Caribbean. The Yanks had squadrons here too. After they all shipped out, it was used occasionally for local traffic. But then Mr Salton bought it up when he moved back to the island. Now it’s just his plane that flies out of here.’

‘How long is the runway?’

‘Pretty long. Six thousand and two feet, if you want to be exact. They could run commercial flights from here just as easily as from Benning, if ever they decided to develop this end of the island. But I guess with Mr Salton gone, that’s not going to happen any time soon.’

I smiled wryly. ‘Oh, I’m not sure about that. I know a man in London who’s very interested in keeping Mr Salton’s investment plans alive.’

We turned the corner of the hangar and I saw the aircraft: a Lear executive jet, about half a million dollars’ worth of luxurious machinery. Its purpose was to transport a busy man about his empire. But the man was dead and his wife apparently not air-minded. No wonder Haslam looked worried: it was odds-on that Mrs Salton would cash in this white elephant and divert the proceeds to something more useful.

He introduced me to Philips, a short, stocky man with a London accent – not Cockney, but unmistakeably metropolitan. We exchanged brief greetings and then Philips engaged Haslam in a technical conversation. I stood looking at the plane for a while, then butted in. ‘Do you mind if I go aboard?’

‘That’s okay,’ said Haslam. ‘Just don’t smoke while we’re on the ground.’

I climbed the boarding ladder and entered the fuselage to find a flying office complete with all modern conveniences, most of them built-in. There were two desks, one with an electronic calculator and a recording machine, the other fitted with a typewriter, another tape recorder and a photocopier. I guessed that was Mrs Forsyth’s post. I opened a filing cabinet nearby; it was empty.

I moved aft and opened a door in a bulkhead. There was a corridor leading to the tail. I went along it and found myself in the galley, gleaming in stainless steel. I checked a cupboard at random and found what would have been a well-stocked cocktail cabinet had there been any bottles in it. Of course, if the aircraft had been due to go back to the manufacturers, the booze would have been tactfully removed.

The galley was spotless but there was not a scrap of food in it. Even the refrigerator was empty. I pulled down a flap and found myself looking into a microwave oven. After another glance around I decided there wasn’t anything for me here so I went forward again along the corridor.

There was a door on the starboard side which led into a sleeping cabin with accommodation for two. The beds were narrow but comfortable, as I found by testing, and they were made up ready for use. I slid open a wardrobe door and found three suits in various weights of cloth. When I checked the pockets I found nothing, not even a shred of lint. Whoever valeted Salton knew their job.

I drew a blank in the dressing table too. Neatly folded double-cuff shirts, underwear, ties, shoes, socks and nothing much else. All clean and tidy. But there was something missing and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

When I got back to the main cabin, Haslam was climbing aboard. ‘What do you think of it?’ he asked.

‘Where’s the ticker tape and the teletype?’ I asked jokingly.

He grinned. ‘It wasn’t for the want of trying.’

Something clicked. ‘There’s something else missing,’ I said. ‘There are shirts back there but no cufflinks; ties but no tiepins.’

‘Mr Salton’s personal jewellery is kept in the safe,’ said Haslam.

‘A safe? I’d like to see inside that. Can you open it?’ He hesitated, so I said, ‘It’s all right, you won’t get into trouble. And you can breathe down my neck.’

The safe was well hidden under the floor. It had a good combination lock and if you’d wanted to extract the whole contraption you’d have had to take the plane apart to do it. Haslam opened it and stood aside. I said, ‘How come you have the combination?’

‘There’s currency of different sorts in there,’ he said. ‘At most airfields we can operate on credit, but at some of the smaller ones – particularly in South America – we have to pay cash for gas, servicing and airfield charges. Sometimes Mr Salton wasn’t aboard, so he gave me the combination.’

That sounded reasonable. I dug into the safe and produced several sheafs of foreign currency – American dollars, Brazilian cruzeiros, Ecuadorian sucres, Bolivian pesos, Peruvian soles and so on. It was quite a wad, even if it did look like Monopoly money. There were no Campanillan pounds but then those wouldn’t be needed.

There were several objects in protective wallets: two cigarette lighters, one of gold and the other of what appeared to be stainless steel but was probably platinum, and two cigarette cases likewise. Four sets of cufflinks and four tiepins, two signet rings and an American silver dollar with a hole bored through it – a good luck piece?

Nothing else.

I put it all back then looked at Haslam. ‘Was all this stuff here when you took the plane back to the manufacturer?’

The expression on his face was a mixture of shock and surprise. ‘You know, no one even thought of it. Mr Salton didn’t mention it and it never occurred to me.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I guess we’ve got to thinking of it as part of the standard equipment of the airplane – like the radio, say. Mr Salton’s clothes weren’t taken off, either.’

‘But the alcohol was,’ I said.

Haslam shrugged. ‘The galley is cleaned out as a matter of course after every flight.’

When I stopped to think about the kind of man I was investigating, it all sounded completely logical. The very rich are not just folks like the rest of us. One of the super-rich once said in surprise, ‘You know, a man with five million dollars can live just as though he were a rich man.’ That’s pretty high-level philosophy.

‘Anything else, Mr Kemp?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not for the moment.’

Haslam went forward to join Philips in the cockpit or the flight deck or whatever fancy name they give it in planes that size. I sat down and began to go through drawers. I didn’t really expect to find anything, but old habits die hard. There’s a curious fascination about going through a man’s effects, delving into the minutiae of his life – not that there was much to find about Salton because the cupboard was bare apart from blank stationery, office knick-knacks and the like. Everything personal had been cleared out, presumably by the efficient Mrs Forsyth.

Presently the plane began to move. We taxied up the runway and then turned. A loudspeaker over my head crackled and Haslam said, ‘Fasten your seatbelt, Mr Kemp.’

I snapped the seatbelt closed and the plane roared off, climbing rapidly. It levelled off and the warning lights went out. Haslam said over the speaker, ‘Okay, Mr Kemp, you can come forward if you want to.’

I found Philips at the controls and Haslam chatting to someone on the radio. He signed off and I said, ‘Who were you talking to?’

‘Air traffic control at Benning Airport.’

‘Do you have to do that, even on a flight like this?’

‘They like to know what’s in the air,’ he said. ‘It’s mostly for the benefit of the missile tracking station at Fort Edward. We’re down-range of Cape Canaveral and they don’t like unforeseen blips on their radar.’ He put his hands on the controls. ‘I’ll take her, Les.’

I studied Philips. ‘You’re a long way from home, Mr Philips.’

He half-turned in his seat so as to face me and somehow combined the movement with a shrug. ‘If you’re in the flying business you get around.’

‘Have you been working for Mr Salton long?’

‘Three years.’

‘Me too,’ said Haslam. ‘Ever since he moved back to Campanilla permanently.’

We chatted for a while. Both Haslam and Philips seemed depressed by the death of Salton and their depression seemed to be an amalgam of worry about their jobs and a genuine regret for the death of their employer: they had both liked Salton and thought him a good boss.

We flew a triangular course and came back to El Cerco flying low over the lagoon. By then I was back in the cabin with my belt fastened for landing, and I had a good view of the house on the tiny island.

I could even see the swimming pool and a diving board on which was a tiny figure that must have been Mrs Salton. As the plane went over, she dived and I caught the splash as she hit the water. Then the plane had passed and I lost sight of her.

Back on the runway I said to Haslam, ‘Thanks for the flip.’

‘Did you find everything you wanted to know?’ he asked.

I grinned at him. ‘Who does?’ I nodded pleasantly and walked away.

He called out, ‘Okay, Les, let’s get the bird back into the nest.’ I turned and looked back to find him staring at me. I waved and he waved back, then I turned the corner of the hangar and looked out over El Cerco.