Bernard Cornwell - Crackdown

“Yes.”

“My name is Deacon Billingsley—” he paused as though I should recognise the name, “and I am a police officer.”

The arrival of Deacon Billingsley should have given me the satisfaction that my telephone call had been treated seriously, but I sensed this policeman was not going to offer me any satisfaction at all. He had spoken very flatly, making his introduction sound like a threat. The sun, mirrored in the obsidian brightness of his glasses, momentarily dazzled me. “What were you doing when you found Hirondelle , Breakspear?” Billingsley asked me.

“Making passage.”

“Making passage.” He mocked my British accent, then turned on Ellen who had stayed on deck to hear the conversation. “Where were you coming from, lady?”

“Hey! Count me out, OK? I didn’t call any goddamn cavalry. You want to know anything about that boat, you ask Nick, not me.” She twisted contemptuously towards the companionway.

Billingsley watched her walk away. “She’s American?” He seemed amused rather than offended by Ellen’s defiance.

“She’s American,” I confirmed.

Ellen dropped out of sight and Billingsley turned back to me. “Are you screwing the American, Breakspear?” I was so astonished by the sudden question that I just gaped at him. “Are you laying the girl?” Billingsley rephrased his insolent question as though I had not understood the first version. His tone of voice was so bland that he might as well have been asking my opinion of Wavebreaker ’s sea-keeping qualities.

“The answer is no,” I finally said, “and fuck off.”

Billingsley lit a cigar. It had a red and yellow band on which I could just read the word Cubana . He took his time; first cutting the cigar, then heating its tip with a succession of matches that he carelessly and provocatively dropped on to Wavebreaker ’s scrubbed deck. He used the toes of his expensive brogues to grind each dead match into the teakwood so that the charred tips smeared black carbonised streaks across the wood’s bone-whiteness. He finally drew the cigar into red heat and discarded the final match. He raised his eyes to stare into my face, and I felt a surge of fear. It was not Billingsley’s physical size that provoked that fear, for I was of a size with him, nor was it his profession that gave me pause, but rather the aura of incipient violence that he radiated like a blast furnace. “You mess with me, Breakspear,” he said in a deceptively mild voice, “and I’ll rip your spine out of your asshole.”

I was damned if I would show him my fear. “Do you have a warrant card?” I asked him instead.

For a second I thought he was going to hit me, but then he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a wallet that he unfolded and thrust towards me, giving me just enough time to see that he held the rank of chief inspector, one of the highest ranks in the Bahamian police force, then the wallet was snapped shut and Deacon Billingsley moved to stand very close to me, so close that I could smell the cigar smoke on his breath. “Where’s the chart you took from Hirondelle? ”

“Down below.”

“Then fetch it,” he said dismissively.

I obeyed. The chart had dried into stiff and faded folds, but Billingsley did not look at it, instead he just screwed it up and thrust it into a pocket of his expensive jacket.

“I also found these,” I said, and offered him the handful of cartridge cases.

He ignored my outstretched hand. “What were you doing at Sister Island, Breakspear?”

The question puzzled me for I had not mentioned Sister Island, nor its old name of Murder Cay, to either the police or to the Defence Forces, nor had Billingsley troubled to look at the pencilled line on the chart, yet he had somehow connected Hirondelle with the mysterious island. “I asked you what you were doing at Sister Island,” Deacon Billingsley said threateningly.

“We weren’t anywhere near the island!” I protested. “You can check that for yourself! I reported the co-ordinates where we found Hirondelle over the radio, and those co-ordinates are twenty miles north-west of Sister Island. That’s as close as we ever got to it.”

He said nothing for a few seconds, and I sensed that I might have unsettled this policeman. I had also angered him, though his anger seemed directed at himself. He had come here on a misunderstanding; believing that Wavebreaker had been at Murder Cay when in fact we had not even been within sight of that mysterious island.

But Billingsley had clearly known about Hirondelle ’s visit to Murder Cay, and I realised that this senior police officer had not come here to enquire into a crime, but to cover it up. Hirondelle ’s owners, he said glibly, had decided to fly home and, despairing of ever selling the yacht in a glutted market, had simply abandoned it and someone had evidently used the hulk for target practice. “Maybe it was the Americans,” Billingsley suggested airily, “you know there’s a naval exercise in progress? Perhaps they machine-gunned the hulk?”

“Those cartridge cases aren’t American issue,” I said, holding out the green-lacquered steel casings. I should have kept my silence, for the only purpose my words served was to demonstrate my disbelief in Billingsley’s outrageous explanation.

That disbelief was a challenge, and Deacon Billingsley was not a man to resist a challenge. He tipped my hand with his own strong grasp, spilling the cartridge cases into his left palm, then, one by one, he tossed the cartridge cases overboard. “You have a boat in the Bahamas.” It was not a question, but a flat statement. “A ketch called Masquerade , presently marooned on Straker’s Cay.”

“She’s not marooned,” I said, “she’s under repair.”

He ignored my emendation, but just continued to toss the cartridge cases over the gunwale. “And how will you repair your boat, Breakspear, or even take her away, if I put your name on the Stop List? You do know what the Stop List is, Breakspear?”

I knew only too well. It was the list of undesirable aliens who were banned from entering the Bahamas, and if my name was put on that Stop List, and if I was then thrown off the islands, I would probably never see my boat again. The threat was effective and blunt.

“Do you understand me?” Billingsley asked as he threw the last cartridge overboard. I suspected that as soon as he left the boatyard the chart would be similarly destroyed. Doubtless Hirondelle had already been blown up, just as my own boat would be butchered if I insisted on challenging this man. “Do you understand me?” he asked a second time.

“Yes.” I tasted the sourness of humble pie.

“So do you still find anything suspicious in the circumstances surrounding your discovery of the yacht Hirondelle? ” Billingsley asked with a mocking punctiliousness that was intended to humiliate me, but the humiliation was my own fault for having challenged the policeman’s lie.

“No,” I said, and hated myself for telling the untruth, but I was thinking of my own boat standing propped on the sand of Straker’s Cay, and I thought of all the work I had lavished on Masquerade , and of all the love and care and time I had poured into her, and I tried to imagine her rotting under the tropical sun with her paint peeling, her deck planks opening and her timbers riddled with termites. So I lied and said I detected nothing untoward in finding a bullet-riddled boat awash in the Bahamian seas.

Chief Inspector Deacon Billingsley raised his right hand and victoriously, patronisingly and very gently, patted my cheek so that I felt the cold touch of his heavy gold rings. “Good boy,” he said derisively. “And when you see Bellybutton, tell him that I know where his brother is, and I’ll pick the bastard up whenever I choose and then feed him head first into a cane-shredder.” He turned abruptly away, not waiting for any answer. The gangplank bounced under his confident step. He walked down the quay without looking back, but he must have known I was watching him for he stopped a few yards short of his car and very ostentatiously took the incriminating chart from his jacket pocket. I thought for a second he was going to burn it, but instead he tore it into tiny scraps that he tossed into the warm wind.