Hilary And The Hurricane (a novelette) (Hilary Manningham-Butler #3.5) Page 4

  The two men directed me towards one of the larger warehouses, a storage facility for one of the big chicle companies. I was pulled around the far side of the wooden structure and the Wart covered me with his revolver while the Bamboo pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the side door.

  ‘How did you get those?’ I wondered out loud, inadvertently breaking the silence.

  The Bamboo was unhappy at being questioned, but the Wart merely smiled and waved away the other man’s fist. He at least did not mind answering questions. ‘We have a good friend who works here.’

  A friend. It took me a moment to join the dots. ‘Mr Turton.’ JG Turton, the shameless map peddler. He was the site foreman for one of the chewing gum companies. ‘Of course.’ This was where he worked.

  ‘He has told us everything about you. He is going to make us rich,’ the Wart continued gleefully.

  The Bamboo yanked open the door and the Wart pushed me roughly inside. It was a relief to get out of the rain, though I could have asked for a more homely place in which to meet my maker. I shivered, regaining my balance. The loss of my hat meant my hair was now wet through and my clothes were heading in the same direction. A second heavy shove, just as I was getting my bearings, sent me sprawling into a packing case. The interior of the warehouse was chock full of stock. Pallets of chicle – raw chewing gum – were piled up everywhere in long, straight rows. A wooden roof, high above us, cast a pallid gloom over the interior, but some light did filter in through a number of small windows.

  I glanced back at my captors. If these men believed a single word JG Turton told them, then they were bigger idiots than I had first supposed. Perhaps I might be able talk my way out of this. Bribe them, even, if money was their god. I had plenty of cash stashed away, since leaving Guatemala. Logically, too, there must be something they wanted from me other than my immediate demise. Why else was I still alive? I clung to that happy notion as best I could. ‘So you’re going off in search of lost treasure, are you?’ I could see the tip of Turton’s map peeping out of the Wart’s jacket pocket.

  The man grinned enthusiastically. ‘Mr Turton says there is a chest full of gold coins. His grandfather discovered the location, many years ago.’

  I scoffed. ‘You only have his word for that.’

  ‘He told us about you. About where you would be last night. He did not lie about that. He would not lie about the map.’

  I suppressed a laugh. ‘You don’t seriously believe you’re going to find buried treasure on some little island, do you?’ The men were fools. They didn’t have a clue what they were doing. But somebody involved in this affair had to possess a brain. I didn’t believe it was Mr Turton, so that left the mysterious fellow I had seen out on the street last night. Was he lurking around here somewhere?

  The Bamboo had taken offence at my unfriendly tone. He pulled out a knife, the one the Wart had used to slash at me last night. ‘I’m going to cut him,’ he said, moving forward with all the menace he could muster, which in fairness was quite a considerable amount. ‘I’m going to cut him good.’

  The Wart put a restraining hand on his companion. He grinned vacantly. ‘Leave him be. The boss said...’

  At that instant, a far door burst open and a figure appeared amid a swirl of rain and wind, a tallish man in a heavy coat. Before I could catch a glimpse of his face, he turned back to close up the door. His body was partially obscured in any case by the edge of a crate between him and us; but I knew at once it was the man I had observed loitering on Regent Street yesterday evening. ‘There are no boats today,’ he declared, in a confident but familiar voice. That filled in another blank. This was the “policeman” who had spoken to me on the telephone at breakfast, the one with the official manner. What had he said his name was? Thornberry? Sergeant Thornberry.

  The man finished locking up the door and then turned back, removing his hat. At last, I got a clear view of his face. There had been something familiar in his gait, but, as I took in his features, I realised with some disappointment that I had never seen him before in my life. The fellow was a complete stranger to me.

  ‘So you managed to find him then?’ the scoundrel observed, as he moved along the line of packing cases towards us. He was about five feet eleven in height and in his early thirties. He was lean and well dressed, with light brown hair and a confident demeanour. His clothes were clean and well cut, even the overcoat barely ruffled by the inclement weather outside. How he had managed not to lose his hat I had no idea.

  The Bamboo grabbed hold of me from behind as he approached us, though I had no intention of running away. The Wart was still covering me with his revolver. ‘Piece of cake, boss.’ The Bamboo chuckled. ‘Just where you said he’d be.’

  The boss man’s eyes were boring into me. ‘Of course. Mr Buxton. Welcome.’ He did not extend a hand, but slipped off his overcoat and slung it over the top of a pallet. ‘We haven’t met.’

  ‘No, we haven’t. Although I believe we did speak on the telephone. You do realise impersonating a police officer is a serious offence?’ It was a particularly lame observation on my part, but my nerves were getting the better of me. I would not be able to maintain my composure for very much longer. I had a nasty feeling events were coming to a head.

  The man smiled slightly, a smile that did not extend to those hard black eyes. ‘It would be if it were true.’

  ‘So...who the devil are you?’ I breathed. Unlike his two thugs, Thornberry did not have the look of a local man.

  ‘My name,’ he declared, ‘is Renee Degarmo.’

  Ah. Not Thornberry then. ‘You’re French?’ He didn’t look like a Frog either, and he certainly didn’t speak with a French accent. He did sound rather well-educated, though.

  ‘My father was French. My mother is Spanish. I was born here in Belize.’

  ‘But...but...’ I was struggling to make sense of this. Why would this supposedly local man have any interest in me? Was he really after the treasure map, like his two goons? The fellow did not look like a simpleton. ‘What do you want from me? Why did these two men abduct me? They’re not from round here, are they?’ Superintendent Sempill had been convinced the felons were from out of town.

  ‘No, they are not,’ Degarmo confirmed. ‘And neither am I.’

  I blinked. ‘But you just said...’

  ‘I said I was born in Belize.’ Which explained the accent. ‘But I live in Guatemala City.’ He let that fact sink in for a moment. ‘And I was not pretending to be a police officer.’ His eyes did not blink. There was an unnatural calm to this fellow which did not bode well for me. That was what I had recognised out in the street. Not the gait, but the attitude. Of course. He was a member of the Guatemalan secret police. Just like General Tejada.

  ‘Good God,’ I breathed. Maurice had been right all along. ‘It was the general who sent you here. He sent you here to kill me.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Degarmo said, as my legs began to tremble. ‘You’re not that important. If you must know, I came here for the festival. I come here every year. It is a beautiful thing.’ He glanced abstractly at a far window, which was rattling heavily in its frame. ‘This weather.’ He frowned. ‘I have never seen anything like it. Not in British Honduras.’

  I did not wish to discuss the weather. If I was going to die, I wanted to find out exactly what was going on. ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘Your friend, Mr Turton...’

  ‘No, I mean, how did you even know I was in Belize?’

  ‘It was not difficult, señor. Where else could you have gone? And you wrote to your friends at the British legation, telling them your address. That was a foolish thing to do.’ The job reference. Of course. The general must have intercepted the mail. ‘They were kind enough to send on your clothes, I believe.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Miss Emily Bunting, my one time secretary, had gathered everything up for me and posted it on. I had not had time to make the arrangements myself
. ‘And the general wants me dead.’

  ‘The general wants you dead,’ Degarmo agreed, matter-of-factly. ‘But that is a secondary consideration. As I have said, I was coming here anyway, for the fiesta.’ He smiled, almost as if there was an ounce of humanity in him. ‘But he would not have asked me to look you up like this if it were a simple matter of revenge. You are nothing to him, señor, not worth the time or trouble.’

  ‘But then...?’

  ‘You stole something from him,’ he said, his eyes locked firmly on mine. ‘Something rather valuable. The general wants it back.’

  And finally I understood what this was all about. ‘The banker’s draft.’

  ‘The banker’s draft,’ Degarmo agreed, with the hint of a smile; a rather large sum of money I had appropriated when I left Guatemala, money that had helped me set myself up in this new country, money that – strictly speaking – did not belong to me. But it did not belong to General Tejada either. ‘That money is the property of His Majesty’s Government. The British government. Your man Tejada has no more right to it than I do.’

  ‘He has every right,’ Degarmo snapped. ‘It is the proceeds of a criminal act.’

  ‘Oh, and he was planning on declaring it, was he? Donating it to the Guatemalan Policeman’s Benevolence Fund?’

  ‘Do not try to be clever with me!’ Degarmo hissed. ‘You are a dead man, Mr Buxton. That is a fact. You will not see another sunset. But it is I who will choose the manner of your death.’

  ‘Not without the money,’ I countered, desperately trying to think of any excuse to delay the inevitable. ‘You can’t go back home empty handed. And you won’t get it without my cooperation.’

  Degarmo raised an eyebrow. ‘Will I not?’

  ‘I don’t see how. In any case, I don’t have the draft any more. I cashed it in weeks ago.’

  ‘I am aware of that, señor. At the Royal Bank of Canada.’ So he had done his homework. ‘But you cannot have spent nine thousand dollars in a little under two months.’

  ‘Maybe not. But I don’t have it with me, do I?’ That was my trump card, I realised now. How could they recover the money without my assistance? ‘You won’t get a penny of it without my help.’

  ‘Sure we will,’ the Wart cut in. ‘All we’ve got to do is break into your apartment and help ourselves.’

  ‘That’s what we were going to do last night,’ the Bamboo added. ‘Ain’t that right, boss?’

  ‘A quick operation,’ Degarmo agreed, sourly. ‘But these two fools bungled it.’

  ‘That’s hardly a surprise,’ I thought, regarding the dim pair. ‘Lord, where on earth did you find them?’

  ‘They have done some work for me in the past, in Puerto Barrios.’ The port town in Guatemala. He must have picked them up on the way out. ‘They are not without their uses.’

  ‘If you say so. You do realise they’re planning to cash in on that treasure map they stole?’ I gestured to the folded paper peeking out of the Wart’s jacket. ‘They believe every damn fool word Mr Turton told them.’

  Degarmo shrugged. He didn’t care what they believed. ‘They are welcome to any treasure they find, in lieu of payment.’ It would save him a few bob, I supposed.

  ‘And you ordered them to...to kill me? Last night, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he agreed, casually. ‘Mr Turton assured us your manservant would be out for the evening. Every Wednesday, he said.’

  ‘What was in it for him?’ I asked. ‘Mr Turton, I mean?’

  ‘A little money. The chance not to end up dead in a ditch.’ Degarmo’s lip curled up slightly. It was clear he did not hold Turton in high regard. There at least we were of one mind. ‘They would have taken your door key and left you in the street,’ he continued. ‘Then we would have gone to your apartment and stolen everything you had. A simple robbery. Nothing suspicious. I understand there has been a spate of burglaries recently.’

  ‘But why did you need to kill me for that? You could have just broken in. I would have been out for the evening anyway, watching the fireworks. No-one would have seen you.’

  ‘And where would be the fun in that?’ Degarmo threw me another rictus smile. ‘We could retrieve the money and lie in wait for your man and he would die too. Oh, the general has not forgotten his role in the proceedings.’ Maurice had helped chain the man up when we had fled the scene. He had been unconscious at the time, but his deputy would have told him all about it. ‘And then, this morning, I would have arranged a boat to take my two friends here well away from this island and I would have been free to enjoy the fiesta this afternoon.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I said. ‘You won’t get a boat out today. Not even to Turneffe.’

  ‘That is true enough. I had not anticipated the bad weather. But it scarcely matters now. Nobody will come looking for you on a day like this.’ The walls of the warehouse rattled loudly, as if to emphasise the point. ‘They will be too busy securing their homes. There is one thing you can tell me, though, Mr Buxton.’ His face became momentarily reflective. He might have been quite handsome, but for those steely eyes. ‘What happened to Joseph Green?’

  Joseph Green was the third member of our party, a plantation worker who the general had tried to frame for murder. He had escaped with us. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘It is not important. He is nothing to us. But it would have been nice to have found all three of you.’

  ‘You can’t touch him,’ I declared defiantly. ‘He’s gone to live in Jamaica. He has a new name, a new identity.’ I was lying, of course. Green was not in Jamaica at all. In fact, I had set him up in business in Stann Creek, a few hours south of here. But it was true about the new identity. ‘You’ll never find him.’

  ‘No matter. The money is our principal concern. You will return every cent you stole and then, I give you my word, your death will be quick and painless.’

  ‘But I don’t have it,’ I protested. ‘You surely don’t imagine I carry that amount of cash around with me?’

  ‘No, of course not. It will be locked away in your apartment.’

  ‘I don’t keep sums like that in the house. Most of it is still in the bank.’

  ‘But your bank book is in the apartment. And your cheque book?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I mumbled, unable to meet his eye. In fact, the cheque book was in my jacket pocket, where it always was, but I wasn’t about to volunteer that fact. That was the one ace I still had up my sleeve. It was lucky for me his accomplices hadn’t thought to search me. ‘But how do you propose...?’

  ‘Your valet is at home. He is always at home at this time, I understand. And you have a telephone installed. There is one here in the office too.’ He gestured to a walled off room to the right, the wooden sides of which were rattling along with the exterior of the building. ‘You will call him and tell him to bring it all here.’ Degarmo was clearly unaware that the phone lines were down.

  ‘What, in this weather?’ I protested.

  ‘There is plenty of time for him to make his way across town. The worst of the storm is still a good hour away.’

  I have never been a particularly accomplished play actor, but I pride myself – when push comes to shove – that I can put on a fairly convincing performance. And push had definitely come to shove.

  The Wart was reaching for the receiver on the phone as I was shuffled into the small office, but I moved and grabbed it from him quickly, before he could put the piece to his ear. If I was to buy myself a little time, I needed to make a convincing job of this. The Wart regarded me suspiciously as I began a short conversation with an entirely fictitious operator. An actress I had once known had told me how to pull off a one sided conversation like this. ‘You need to picture what the other person is saying,’ she said, ‘hear the words in your head.’ In the circumstances, it was useful advice.

  Degarmo moved into the room. He was not prepared to rely on the Wart to oversee proceedings, which showed some sense at least. I paused briefly, pretending to wait
until the woman – I imagined her as a woman – put me through to Maurice.

  ‘Morris,’ I said, keeping my eyes on Degarmo, who had propped himself on a desk. ‘Look, I’m in a spot of bother. I’ve been abducted.’ I tried to imagine my valet’s reaction, as the actress had recommended. ‘Yes, abducted,’ I said. ‘By those two men who assaulted me last night.’ It was not difficult to picture Maurice’s calm voice making the obvious suggestion at this point. ‘Lord, no. Keep away from the police. I’ve got a gun at my head. Look, it’s General Tejada’s mob. One of his deputies. They just want their money back. The banker’s draft, yes. Yes, I’ve told them that. Just bring the money from the safe and my cheque book.’ I followed up with the address of the warehouse.

  ‘Tell him to come alone,’ Degarmo said in a low growl.

  I relayed the instructions and then hung up the phone. I swallowed and regarded the man sitting opposite me with some trepidation. I had put on a pretty good show, I thought, but it was difficult to know for certain. Had I overdone the performance? Was Degarmo suspicious? What if he picked up the phone and discovered that the line was dead? ‘If in doubt,’ another acquaintance of mine had once told me, ‘muddy the waters. Distract their attention.’ It was lucky for me I had associated with quite a number of dubious people in my life.

  ‘You do realise the operator was probably listening in?’ I suggested, following the advice to the letter. That should grab his attention, I thought. ‘She’ll know I’ve been abducted and she’ll contact the police. They’ll be here in no time.’ Degarmo did not blink. ‘You’ve still got a few minutes to make a run for it.’

  ‘You forget, señor. I was born in Belize. The people here are very well brought up. An operator would not listen in to a private conversation. And, besides, she will have more pressing concerns today.’

  ‘If you say so.’ So much for that idea. I tried another tack. I was getting desperate now. ‘Look, Mr Degarmo, all this really isn’t necessary. You don’t have to kill me. I’ve done nothing to offend you. And I have connections. I can give you the money. You can take it all for yourself. You can disappear, like Joseph Green. Start a new life, anywhere you like. I could probably even get you a passport. I used to be a passport control officer. You could go to Europe. You could settle in Spain. You might pass for a Spaniard, in a dim light. And it’s a republic now. They take all sorts.’