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“You can explain in the car,” Vilma said. “Best get moving now.”
Ruby looked at the bloodbath Hebblethwaite’s study had become. She suddenly remembered her ‘training’, such as it was: a two hour briefing, five years ago, from Maddison, in a greasy spoon café in Westbury on Trym. When you’re at your limits, force yourself to rationalise. Cedric and Joseph. They’d been looking for notebooks. Likely that was what lay behind all the shooting. Their corpses were still clinging to one specimen each. It felt macabre, but she took them. She threw away the loose leaf she’d taken earlier.
“What are you doing?” Vilma asked.
“I’ll explain in the car.” Or would she? Merely talking was going to be an effort now, let alone ordering her thoughts sufficiently to articulate a vindication. “Come on.”
She picked up her gun and checked the cylinder. The boys had been right. It wasn’t loaded. She wiped it for fingerprints and swapped it for Hebblethwaite’s. He had a collection of magazines in his desk drawer. She’d felt them when he’d made her look for the handcuffs. She took them.
“Come on!” Vilma said irritably. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Please, just let me think.”
“If I get caught here, my entire country’s in deep trouble! You owe me. Now get moving or I’m leaving you behind.”
She walked away. Ruby looked round for a bag to put everything in, but realised that was the sort of thing a delirious person would do. She ran up the stairs and drew level with Vilma.
“What are you doing here?” she asked her.
“When did you last sleep?” Vilma asked. “I know you’re probably in shock, but you’re acting and talking like you’ve snorted half a kilo of cocaine.”
“Sleep? On the plane, probably, on the way over.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Several hours. About seventy-two.”
“Bloody hell,” she said, using the two English words. “No wonder you’re crazy.”
They got in the car. Vilma pulled away and accelerated till she was touching nearly seventy.
“Can I ask where we’re going?” Ruby said. “Are you taking me to the Cuban embassy?”
Vilma laughed. “You actually think you’d be welcome there?”
“I’m a British spy. Communist ambassadors tend to like us ... when we come to them.”
“I’m not taking you to the Cuban embassy. I still love my country enough not to lumber it with a female Billy the Kid.”
“I didn’t kill him. You did.”
“‘Thank you’ would be nice.”
“Thank you, Vilma. You saved my life.” She laughed. “We’re quits now. Except I saved yours twice. No, three times.” She didn’t normally talk like this. Listening to herself, she almost felt embarrassed.
“Twice,” Vilma said.
They sat without speaking for the next five miles. The Jamaican countryside flew past, growing ever flatter and more suburbanised. Suddenly, Ruby found herself weeping. Just the effect of nearly dying and being dead beat was enough. What made it worse was Marcus and his two sons, and Camilla and Cynthia – the two C’s, she recalled, and that redoubled her grief: it made the two women somehow pathetic as well as tragic.
She didn’t make a noise as she wept, and Vilma kept her eyes on the road so she didn’t notice. In this heat, tears soon dried anyway. More very un-spy-like behaviour, but it was too late now to throw in the towel. She had to get to the bottom of this even if it killed her, which it probably would.
It literally would.
The car slowed and pulled off the road into a suburban driveway with a white bungalow at the end whose windows were all shuttered. A rusting tricycle stood on a square of parched grass with a dead tree in the middle.
The car stopped and Vilma applied the handbrake. “Get out and follow me.”
They were met at the door by an old woman with a solemn expression and braided hair. They passed a room with six men lounging in front of a TV, none of whom looked up. Finally, they came to a toilet. Vilma pushed open the door. “Go inside and urinate,” she said.
Ruby went in, closed the door, did as commanded, and washed and dried her hands. When she came out, Vilma was leaning against the wall. She raised herself. “Follow me,” she said again.
They walked five paces to a bedroom with a single cot in it and a high window. Ruby noticed the door had an outside lock.
“Get undressed and get some sleep,” Vilma said. “And don’t even think about trying to escape, because you can’t. You’re going to get at least twelve hours, and we’ll talk tomorrow morning.”
“Where am I?” Ruby said.
Vilma smiled thinly. She held up the key. “In jail.”
She closed the door and locked it. Ruby took off her clothes and left them in a pile in the middle of the floor. She climbed into the bed, and pulled the covers over herself as a matter of habit even though it was far too hot. She wouldn’t be able to sleep. Too much had happened. Too many things playing on her mind. Too much trauma.
She dreamed about Millicent and Cynthia, and they were one and the same person – but also two. She’d been sent from London with specific instructions to stop them coming to harm, but although they sat beside her on the plane from Heathrow, somehow she lost them when she arrived at the airport. That then became common knowledge, not only in Jamaica, but also in Britain, and a host of important people – her parents, Parton, Maddison, Vilma, Edna Manley - appeared from nowhere to sneer at her incompetence. But there was no finding the two women. They’d died and gone into the underworld. And there was no stemming the public derision. It would accompany her indefinitely. She appeared on the front page of The Gleaner looking tired and miserable and old.
She stirred four times in the dark, remembered where she was, felt vaguely desolate, and fell asleep again. On her fifth awakening, sunlight was coming through the window, and somehow it roused her spirits. Her internment was coming to an end. Reassured, she felt completely exhausted in a way she hadn’t before and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep that lasted until someone shook her.
She opened her eyes. Vilma, holding a glass of orange juice. “Drink this,” she said. “Then you’re going to tell me everything.”
Ruby laughed. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “You mean top secret classified information?”
“We both know you’re neither senior enough, nor sufficiently popular with your superiors to have been trusted with anything significant. Whatever MI6 has told you, we probably already know.”
“You think so?”
“The CIA are smuggling weapons into Jamaica in an attempt to augment the violence and undermine the PNP. They and MI6 are 100% behind the Edward Seaga. You’re both giving the JLP financial and moral support.”
Ruby took a breath. “I didn’t know we were smuggling weapons in. I knew we wanted a Seaga victory.”
“Listen, I’m not bothered about the Cold War. I’m bothered about you. I’ve been given two weeks off work to come and help you. Official leave for unofficial reasons.”
“You want to help me smuggle weapons into Jamaica?”
“Is that what you personally are doing?”
“No, but - ”
“MI6 wouldn’t trust you to do that. Not in a million years. And it’s not something your Daddy would approve of. So step messing around before I get really annoyed.”
Ruby sipped her orange juice. It was important with Vilma not to show her you were fazed. “I was sent here simply to assess the situation on the ground, that’s all. You say weapons are coming in. I didn’t know anything about that. My job is simply to gauge whether the anarchy’s gone too far. No one in Langley or London wants a civil war.”
“Nice of them.”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got five thousand troops in the country.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s a deliberate falsehood designed to inspire panic. Where the hell could you hide five thousand troops in an island the size of Jamaica?”
“The mountains, maybe.”
“How are they fed and maintained? Look, I’ll be straight with you, Ruby. I’m not expecting Fidel and his administration to survive. I’d like them to, but that’s another matter. With or without a PNP victory, I think we’re finished.”
“I doubt that.”
Vilma scoffed. “Since April we’ve had over a hundred thousand citizens leave by boat for Miami. And the doors are still open. Ten thousand tried to gain asylum in the Peruvian embassy. Others tried the same thing at the Spanish and Costa Rican consulates. We’re poor and becoming poorer, and the richest country in the world still refuses to trade with us. And you’re trying to tell me we’re maintaining five thousand soldiers in the Jamaican mountains? And not one’s defected? Not one’s been photographed? Or even seen? Where are they hiding?”
It was about the most convincing presentation Ruby had ever sat through. “Okay, you win,” she said.
“We can barely look after ourselves, let alone Jamaica.”
“Who are those men in the other room, then? The ones I saw on my way in.”
“Members of the Workers Party of Jamaica. Communists, yes, but actual Jamaicans, every last one. This is a free country. You are still allowed to be a communist.”
“And Havana hasn’t trained them?”
“We may have done ... in the past. But that’s all over now. We haven’t the money for that sort of thing. Look, I’m not denying it: we probably would help Manley if we could. But we can’t, so we’re not.”
“So what are those men doing here? I mean, in this house?”
“They’re here to help us. Us two. If we need them. They’re here because I asked them to be. That’s it. It’s your turn to start answering questions now. If you don’t want my help, though, say now. I’ll leave and we’ll never see each other again. Best of British.”
Ruby took her arm and squeezed it. “I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for you. And I’m not so pig-headed as to imagine I’m going to last five minutes on this island without your help. What do you want to know?”
“How I can save your life a second time. In other words, everything.”
“As I said, my brief was to find out what effect the British and American ‘troublemaking’ – I didn’t know it was weapons: I thought it was just propaganda - is having on Jamaican society. The thinking was that a black couple would be better placed than any combination of white people to investigate its impact on the poorest civilians. Because it’s a joint US-UK initiative, I was expected to link up with a black CIA operative called Josiah Collins. I was told to expect him on the day after my arrival, and – informally - that he’d be somewhat austere and puritanical. Imagine my surprise then when Collins turned up in the early hours of next morning, anything but a prig. Except, as I later discovered from you, it wasn’t him at all. The real Collins was lying dead in a dustbin in the city. Anyway, this whoever-he-was wanted to take me to a party in downtown Kingston, but first I had to get some suitable clothes. He arranged for me to do a swap with a woman called Millicent.”
“Where did he find her?”
“We were in a taxi. He took me to her house.”
“He must have known her already, right? That’s a lead.”
“Not one I could follow up. She was one of the murdered women, and if you’re right, her relatives came and took her body away to the countryside.”
“You might not be able to follow it up, Ruby, but the guys in the other room almost certainly can. The WPJ’s openly campaigning for the PNP, and that was a PNP party. If she was there, she was probably a sympathiser.”
“Or maybe she just liked to dress up, go out, and dance.”
“There aren’t that many floating voters out there at the moment. If you’re young, you’re with one or the other. You have to be. What happened after she was murdered?”
“Collins – I’ll call him that – sat with me while I recovered.”
“Recovered from what? You’ve seen your fair share of killing, girl.”
“Too much rum and strong marijuana. I was attempting to fit in.”
Vilma laughed. “I wish I’d seen that. Then what?”
“Then we drove over to Spanish Town for a Michael Manley rally. On the way, Collins tried to sell me some kind of Black Power spiel and persuade me that Manley’s the black man’s last hope. We argued. I thought he was testing me and I wanted to show him I wasn’t an easy dupe.”
“Interesting.”
“He actually asked me at one point whether I thought someone might be gunning for me. I mean, like a professional assassin. I think he may have been trying to warn me. But I dismissed it out of hand. At the time, it seemed disrespectful. As if, ‘yes, all these people have been killed, but it’s really all about me.’ I wasn’t prepared to go down that route.”
“Makes it less likely he killed the real Collins if he was trying to warn you.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you actually see him when the shots went off?”
“At the party? I was dancing with him. He pulled me to the floor when the shooting started. Looking back, he may even have saved my life.”
“Sorry, I didn’t hear that last bit. You? Dancing?”
“Too much rum and strong marijuana.”
“Yes, sorry, I forgot.”
“When we got there, he used his journalistic credentials to get us backstage, except – and this is where I began to wonder what was going on, but not seriously – he was from a different paper than the one I was told the real Collins was. The real Collins was supposed to be from The Miami Sun, but the paper my guy was from was The Miami Black Star.”
“You ever heard of Marcus Garvey?”
“The Universal Negro Improvement Association. Born in Jamaica. Died in London sometime in 1940.”
“I guess you didn’t know he started a shipping company called The Black Star Line. Aimed at helping black people get back to Africa.”
“Actually, I didn’t.”
“Looks like your fake Collins may actually have been wearing his heart on his sleeve when he started lecturing you that morning,” Vilma said.
“Then I was shot and, like any good idealist, he disappeared.”
“Probably realised he’d been playing with fire and thought it’d finally caught up with him.”
Ruby finished her juice and put her glass on the floor. “Anyway, I’ve been keeping the best till last. I actually know who he is.”
“So do I. He’s an American journalist who works for The Miami Black Star.”
“He’s called Andrew Walker and he’s related to a local PNP-affiliated gangster called Glenford Weddermon.”
Vilma drew her chin back. “Weddermon? My God. Are you sure?”
“At the party we went to, a few men greeted him as ‘Glenford’s boy’. He seemed anxious to get them away from me. The two men I was with yesterday actually knew him. And Andrew Walker. Walker’s Weddermon’s nephew. And Beverley Manley actually expected an Andrew Walker. Somehow, either Walker saw Collins get killed, or he actually killed him, then assumed his identity. There’s no other explanation.”
“That brings me to my final question. What on earth was going on when I arrived at the hotel yesterday?”
“After you and Maria left Nyumbani, I went back there, as you obviously calculated I would. I thought news of my supposed death might not have filtered up there yet, and the money and the gun I’d been given at the outset might still be waiting for me. They weren’t. I managed to retrieve the gun, but the owner – the man you shot – had put my passport and billfold in his safe in the cellar. Two of the three men who were lying dead when you arrived were trying to help me retrieve them.”
“Why ever would they do that?” Vilma asked.
“Once I’d got over my initial surprise, I asked myself the same question. I don’t think they were trying to help me, actually. I think they were up to something else, and using me as a pretext, or possibly as a scapegoat if they were challenged. ‘She held us at gunpoint and forced us to search’. Something like that.”
“So what do you think they were looking for? Valuables?”
Ruby shook her head. “Notebooks.”
“Like the ones you took out of their hands before you left?”
“The ones that are in amongst my clothes, with Hebblethwaite’s gun and ammunition.”
“You realise you can’t keep that? It ties us to the killings. All four. I’ll get one of the boys to dispose of it somewhere on the other side of town.”
“Fair enough. But I’ll probably need another.”
“That can be arranged.” She stood up and sifted through Ruby’s clothes until she came to the two notebooks. “We need to spend today going through the evidence. Beginning with these two pads.” She opened them and frowned. “Which are apparently written in code.”
“Then we need to find Andrew Walker,” Ruby said. “Agreed?”
Vilma nodded. Suddenly, there was a commotion from the next room. The men were shouting to each other.
From outside the house, they heard a male voice speaking through a megaphone. “Miss Ruby Parker, this is the police. We know you’re in there. We have the house surrounded. Repeat: we have the house surrounded. Come out with both arms in the air. Repeat: leave the house with your hands above your head.”
They froze. Before they could speak, or think, the door opened and a policeman burst in with a gun.
