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An eerie wail went up from outside the Colonel’s house, loud enough to disturb the stillness, sufficiently soft to suggest it was some way distant. Like a shofar, a ram’s horn-trumpet, and equally plaintive.
“What was that?” Vilma said.
Walker sat up and grimaced. “An abeng. Someone’s on their way.”
“Get Errol,” Ruby told Vilma. “We can’t take any chances.”
They’d already decided they should leave anyway, but this added urgency.
Another abeng sounded, or maybe the same one, and Vilma went to find the Colonel. Ruby put the notebooks back in her pocket and gathered her things. “Do you think you can get up?” Ruby asked Walker.
He squeezed a grin. “No.”
“Come on, let me help.”
“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I can’t.”
Vilma came back into the room. “Someone’s on their way up here all right. According to the Colonel, going by the sound of the abeng, it’s a small army. And coming from both directions. We’re already trapped.”
Errol came in. He was about to speak when Ruby cut him off with a “We know”.
“Where’s the car?” Vilma asked.
“Two villages away and out of sight,” Errol said. “I thought something like this might happen. You two are too complacent.”
“We’ve had a medical emergency,” Vilma said.
“Didn’t stop you partying last night,” Errol replied. He held his palms up. “Hey, I’m not looking for a fight. Just an observation.”
“I’m assuming we can cut through the bush without hitting any more centipedes,” Vilma said.
“I don’t know,” Errol replied. “I’m not a country boy.”
Vilma smiled. “It wasn’t a question.”
The Colonel – tall, white-haired and flat-footed - came into the room, leaning heavily on his walking stick. “I’ve got someone to lead you to safety,” he said.
“Walker says he’s not coming,” Ruby said.
“Think again,” Vilma told him.
“If it’s my uncle, he’ll take running as a sign of guilt. Then he’ll find me wherever I go. If he’s going to kill me, he might as well do it now, when I’m sick enough to feel it might be a pleasanter alternative.”
“What if it’s not your uncle?” Ruby said. “What if it’s the police, or the CIA?”
“The CIA don’t have ‘a small army’,” he replied. “If it’s the police, they’re in cahoots with Parton, and if you’re right, Parton and my uncle have some kind of deal going on. Either way, if he’s made up his mind to finish me off, then running away isn’t going to stop him. My only chance is to persuade him he’s wrong.”
“You’re not thinking,” Ruby said. “If you want to stop these guns coming in, then you are pitted against Weddermon, like it or not. Stop calling him your ‘uncle’. It’s only going to make things harder. Do you want to help stop the violence escalating, or do you want to become its victim?”
He looked at her groggily. “You’re right. I’m not being rational. Ought to do one good thing in my life. Been a waste so far.”
“Can you stand?” she asked.
He tried and failed. Errol came round the other side and helped Ruby lift him. Vilma had gone outside. They could hear cars approaching now.
They hauled Walker out of the bungalow. Their guide - a muscular man of about forty dressed all in denim – stood in a clearing in the undergrowth. He wore a dour expression. “Follow me,” she said.
Ruby was already having second thoughts. “Maybe we should stay here and give ourselves up,” she said. “What if they start torturing the villagers, asking where we’re hidden?”
Vilma permitted herself a grin. “Most of the men here have got guns,” she said. “And Weddermon probably depends on them to shelter some of his more dubious customers from time to time. He’s in no position to make demands. Besides, you don’t get trigger-happy in Maroon country unless you’ve a death wish. Now stop prevaricating.”
Their guide was already a long way in front. Errol and Ruby took one side each of Walker, and Vilma brought up the rear.
They were two hundred yards in when they heard men coming after them.
“How far to your car?” Ruby asked Errol.
“We’re never going to outrun them,” he replied. “We need to hide out till they’ve passed.”
Their guide obviously had the same idea. He turned to face them and pointed to three separate places in the undergrowth; one for Vilma, another for Walker and Errol, a third for Ruby. They separated to different sides of the track and plunged into the spaces.
A few seconds later, two men marched by with pistols pointed at the ground. One tall, the other smaller and more muscular. They looked like they knew where they were going.
Ruby saw roughly where the others had gone, but there was no point anyone coming out unless the guide knew an alternative route. She suspected they were just going to sit tight till the gangsters either got lost or double-backed and returned to the village. She examined the foliage around her. A centipede would be disastrous now. The longer she sat here, the more nervous she’d feel, but it couldn’t be helped.
There was a shout from ahead. Then another silence.
Suddenly, the two men came back, much more nervously this time, pointing their guns at the undergrowth like something was going to burst out and smother them at any minute.
“I’ll go back to the village and get reinforcements,” one of them told the other.
The second put his arm in the way. “You’re not leaving me here on my own.”
Vilma stood up. She had Hebblethwaite’s gun trained on them. “Drop your weapons.”
They turned to face her, and raised their pistols, but not fast enough. She shot their legs from beneath them then ran in and grabbed their guns. Once the shock and the realisation that they weren’t dead sank in, they started yelling, and that was the signal to move again. Errol and Ruby resumed position around Walker, and Vilma followed, carrying three guns now.
“That tall guy was their tracker,” she said. “Unless we’re very unlucky, they won’t have another like him.”
“We can hide out near the river,” their guide said. “I know a place.”
They stayed in a wide rocky cleft behind a waterfall for what seemed like forever, until the guide assured them it was safe to come out. Two hours’ walk took them through dense woodland, around a mountain with astonishing views over valleys and uplands, across meadows and alongside subsistence farmland. The village where Errol had left the car wasn’t so different from the one they’d left: a mixture of shacks and one or two bungalows. Vilma gave their guide money and a gun for his trouble.
“I thought you’d ditched Hebblethwaite’s pistol,” Ruby said irritably.
“I un-ditched it when I heard Weddermon was on his way.”
“It must have been pretty easy to come across.”
“Good job it was. I’m supposed to be a doctor. Since I’ve been here I’ve killed one man and seriously wounded two others. All for you.”
Errol drove, Walker sat shotgun looking unhealthy, Ruby and Vilma sat in the back. They put the top down. The wind and the sunshine combed their hair as they made towards the lowlands. Errol didn’t say where he’d found the car, but, as Vilma pointed out, that didn’t necessarily mean it was stolen. The WPJ got money from the Comintern, or so they claimed. What they used it for was only loosely monitored by the Russian embassy.
“You realise they’re bound to catch us before long,” Vilma said. “Our faces will be on Wanted posters the length and breadth of the island, and we’ll be on TV. We need to come up with a plan before that happens.”
It was a rhetorical statement. They called in at a roadside café for jerk chicken and Pepsi, and when they pulled out, Ruby leaned over the front to speak to Errol.
“Where are we actually going?” she asked.
“Place I know in Port Antonio,” he replied.
“You’re sure it’s not being watched by the police?”
“We’ll do a sweep of the area before we go in.”
“Pull in,” she told him. “I’ve got a plan, and it involves us going back to Kingston.”
He didn’t argue. He found a dirt track leading to a settlement with goats grazing on scrubland and pulled to a halt.
“We’re all listening,” he said.
“This better be good,” Vilma said.
“Or what?” Ruby replied.
“We’re all sticking our necks out for you,” Errol said.
“Look,” she said. “I thought we wanted to stop a huge consignment of guns coming into Jamaica. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I should just walk down to Trafalgar Road and hand myself in at the Cuban embassy.”
“I could have helped you do that at the outset,” Vilma said.
“When exactly was ‘the outset’?” she replied. “You mean, when you and I met at Manley’s place? Because from my point of view, that was already some way in. Don’t forget, I saved your life twice in Africa, and I didn’t do it from a position of relative safety. I went in expecting not to come out alive. So don’t start lording it over me now, just because the boot’s on the other foot. I’m sitting here, in this car, instead of filling in an application for asylum in a foreign embassy, because I’ve had a belated conversion to a paltry idealism and I want to stop weapons coming into Jamaica. True, it’s no more than a token gesture, given that the country’s getting flooded with guns from all over. But it means something to me. If you’re not on board with it, fine. Leave me here. I’ll make my own way to Kingston and organise a solution from there.”
A protracted silence. Eventually, Errol chuckled. “I really believe you would, too.”
Vilma took Ruby’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re right. All this is taking its toll. I’m not cut out to be a leader.”
“Who said you were?” Ruby said.
“I’m older than you!”
They looked at each other. The hostility had all gone, but nothing had yet arrived to take its place and, for a moment, they both felt helpless and perplexed. Then they laughed.
“Let’s hear this plan,” Vilma said.
“It involves the guys who were arrested at the safe house you took me to,” she replied. “I know they’re in custody now, before anyone asks, because it said so in The Gleaner. Now I’m guessing the Workers’ Party of Jamaica has lawyers on a retainer for cases like this. We need to use them to get a message inside. The police need to learn that the detainees have information about the women who were in the house with them, important facts they’re only prepared to divulge to someone high up. They’re frightened and they want protection. Then we – the four of us - need extra men. We’re going to stake out wherever they’re being held.”
They all considered this. On the road behind them, a lorry roared by. A goat trotted past and slowed when it was at a distance. Walker turned to face her.
“I feel a lot, lot better now,” he said.
