Gavin Lyall - Shooting Script

Diego still hadn't shown up, which was odd if he really wanted to meet the Mitchell – but not so odd if he'd found something else twenty years old and rather less modified. Aeroplanes ran a bad fourth to sex in his life.

By the time I'd cured my own thirst and went over to collect the jeep from the cargo pier, we were into the short tropical twilight. The tall lights around the loading bay came on as I walked across, turning the concrete blue and cold in contradiction to the soft warm air. Everybody else had gone – cargo planes, without passengers to worry about, work union hours -and all the sheds were locked except the last, which never held anything but my jeep and a few cargo trolleys.

I drove round the end of the terminal pier heading for the back gate, slowing up for a last look at the Mitchell. She stood there, dark, lonely, but with that watchful look all nose-wheel aeroplanes have, unable to sit back and rest on their tails. A cluttered old lady on sentry duty…

Hell, I was getting sentimental about that box of junk. Still, I didn't have any other aeroplane to get sentimental about now. Or maybe it was because she'd once fought a war.

I was about to pull away when I remembered the heap of plastic covers that I'd used to stretch over the Dove's engines and cockpit when she was standing in the sun. Without the Dove, they'd sat in the back seat of the jeep all week, and I was lucky nobody had pinched them. There are enough Jamaicans for whom a few square feet of plastic are halfway to a house. Now, maybe, the Mitchell could use them. I got out and yanked them off the seat.

Then I knew what had made Diego late.

He'd been there some time, so he just stuck out over the side of the jeep, stiff as the plank from the side of a pirate galleon. Then the drag of the covers, as I dropped them, toppled him over and he fell with a sound I can hear again whenever I close my eyes. I closed my eyes then, too.

When I had them open and focused again, he was lying beside the back wheel, in the curled, crunched shape set by the space behind the jeep's front seats. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to know, I rolled him so he balanced on his back, and in the dim back-glow of the neon lights on the far side of the cargo pier I could see the splatter of black blood on his white shirt front. When I looked closer, there wasn't just one hole, but dozens of small ones.

Then I started the long walk back across the bright cold concrete to the warm lights of the terminal. Except that I ran a lot of it.

'A shotgun,' said the inspector. 'When you think about it, that tells us quite a lot.'

There were two of them: an English inspector and a Jamaican sergeant. The inspector was a man with pale cold eyes, a neat little moustache, clipped hair, and the general finicky-tough look you get from Englishmen who come out to be cops in somebody else's country. He was wearing a summer suit, but made it look a lot smarter than the sergeant's uniform. The sergeant was a long, loose man with a thin bony face and big solemn eyes.

It was nearly ten o'clock and we were still up in an office near the top of the control tower. A dusty-white room lined with the usual maps covered with the usual coloured strings and wax-pencil scribbles. There was an old travel-agent's model of a DC- 7C on the desk and the inspector couldn't keep his hands off it: twizzling it on its stand, flicking the propellers.

The sergeant said gravely: 'Not many shotguns in Jamaica, sir.'

'Exactly. It's not anative weapon. That's one thing. Second, it means premeditation; you don't just happen to have a shotgun with you. And finally, it means he wasn't killed here.'

He looked at me, with the hint of a triumphant smile behind the toughness, waiting for me to ask why.

I said: 'You mean the noise?'

He frowned and spun a couple of propellers quickly. 'Yes, exactly. I know the airport's a noisy place, but they'd still have heard a shotgun up here. If he was killed here some time last night.' And he nodded out of the window towards the end cargo shed, 200 yards away.

In the cold neon light there was a little huddle of vehicles: ambulance, police jeep, motorcycles, and dark figures moving slowly around them, measuring, searching, conferring – probably telling each other that a shotgun would have been, heard up in the control tower.

I said: 'You've got a perfect place for a murder just outside: the road to Port Royal. There isn't a house on it for five miles. So why don't you throw him in the bushes or chuck him in the sea there? Why go to the risk of bringing him into the airport and dumping him in my jeep?'

He flicked another propeller and gave me a crafty look. 'Perhaps he wanted to throw suspicion on you – had you thought of that?'

I shook my head. 'I don't see that, either. If he knew my jeep was a safe place to hide the body, he'd have to know I was away for the night – in Colombia. So I'd have an alibi anyway.'

'Ah yes.' He flipped back through his notebook. 'An alibi which will be backed up by an American girl lawyer, who will be here shortly. An American – girl – lawyer.'

He made it sound like an insult. '

It had been a long, full day. I felt like yawning, thought about not, then went ahead and yawned in his face.

'You don't seem very interested! ' he barked. 'I thought this man was a friend of yours.'

I shrugged. 'I was teaching him to fly twins. I was making money out of him.'

The sergeant said: 'You had your aeroplane confiscated in Santo Bartolomeo the other day.'

The inspector jerked around. 'Where d'you hear this?'

The sergeant waved a long thin hand in a helpless gesture. 'I just heard it around, su'.'

The inspector glared, then turned back to me. 'So you didn't have an aeroplane any more at the time?'

'True. But at the time I was still in Barranquilla.'

'Ha.' He twizzled the model into a flat spin. 'Well, what d'you suggest?'

'That he was waiting for me last night. He'd wait by my jeep because that's the one place he couldn't miss me. Somebody shot him and stuffed him under the covers as the nearest hiding place.'

He smiled thinly. 'You're forgetting the noise, aren't you? Have you ever heard a shotgun?'

The sergeant said: 'He must have, sir. Fighter pilots train with shotguns and clay pigeons. Something about learning deflection shooting.'

The inspector jerked around again. 'I suppose you just heardthat around, too?'

The sergeant smiled apologetically.

I said: 'Maybe it wasn't a shotgun.'

'You really think so? I know doctors are wrong most of the time, but not even a doctor could get a shotgun wound wrong.'

I just shrugged again. I could perhaps have added something to his store of knowledge on the subject, but his sneer at J.B. had got me niggled. Andhe was supposed to be the detective around here; let him detect something. Or ask his sergeant.

I just said: 'It's still the simplest solution.'

'Possibly,' he conceded. 'But let's consider the motive. What can you offer?'

'From some hints he dropped, he'd got a sex Ufelike a tomcat with reheat. Maybe he picked on somebody whose husband owned a… a shotgun.'

'Yes' – he nodded – 'yes, that's possible. A planter, somebody who lives out of Kingston. Somebody who'd need a shotgun for the mongoose.'

Oddly, the mongoose is a pest in Jamaica. Somebody brought them in some time back – probably from India – to get rid of the snakes. They did that, then started on the chickens as a dessert.

'But,' the inspector added, 'why come out to the airport to ki U him?1 Because you couldn't have found him to kill him anywhere else in the last few days: he'd been up in Ochoríoswith Whitmore. And probably when Luiz drove him down last night, they stopped for a drink in Kingston – and at one of Diego's boozing-places, because Luiz wouldn't know Kingston. And if you were an angry husband, you could have been haunting Diego's favourite joints the last few days, waiting for him. Then all you had to do was trail him to the airport, wait until Luiz went back, come quietly up in the dark cargo shed, and – bang.