The Bone Readers Page 11

  I sat with Lonnie on my step and we talked through the chill of an Old Hope night. At eighteen, Lonnie had built her own concrete bungalow from the fruits and vegetables she traded in Trinidad. She had her own car too, and owed no-one a cent. She said little about her childhood, although somewhere among the shadows of her past I detected the presence of a man.

  Close to morning, she drew up her knees and folded her arms around them and began rocking back and forth. She gave me a long, sideways look.

  ‘I have to tell you something.’

  ‘Tell me, then.’

  ‘You wouldn like it.’

  ‘Your past won’t bother me, Lonnie.’

  ‘You wouldn know until I tell you.’

  ‘Go ahead, then.’

  She gave me a smile that wasn’t a smile at all. She stopped the rocking, slid me another sideways look. ‘I’ll tell you when I ready.’

  She pressed her head against my shoulder and said we should go inside.

  In the morning, she squeezed herself into the chair I sat on. ‘I want people to see us together. Everybody.’

  ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘Next coupla weeks suit you?’

  She selected my clothes – a soft white shirt patterned with gold crosshatches that felt as if I had nothing on. She’d bought me a pair of cream, tightfitting denims; black convos with white soles and laces. And when Lonnie had finished dressing me to please herself, she handed me a bottle of aftershave and said that tonight she wanted me to smell like that for her.

  She was dressed in a shimmering something that looked as if a layer of silver liquid was clinging to her skin.

  We stepped out, silenced the group of boys sitting on the culvert by the roadside in the moonlight. I fed a pirated cd of DJ Terror – Bounty Killer – Dance Hall Mix into the player, nodded and bounced all the way down south.

  We got there after midnight. BeeGee’s Night Club was heaving. On the beach behind the building, fellas drifted like washed-up sea-creatures.

  I heard my name, looked around to see Caran – in a loose multicoloured shirt, the short sleeves rolled up to his deltoids – a white cap turned back to front on his head. A full-fleshed woman with permed hair and eyes as black as Malan’s was standing beside him. Despite the pretty party shirt Caran still had the aura of a soldier. I hurried over to them with Lonnie. He dropped an arm on my shoulder and turned to the woman – ‘Digger in the flesh,’ he said. ‘Digger meet my breaker. She name Mary.’

  Mary laughed, held out her hand and offered me a beautiful gap-toothed smile. ‘Boy, I tired hear ’bout you from Caran. When you coming to my house?’

  I opened my palms and grinned. ‘Right now if yuh want.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ she laughed.

  Caran was holding Lonnie’s hand in his. ‘Digger, this is your queen?’

  I lowered my head and raised my brows at Lonnie. Lonnie’s face was glowing when she nodded and took my hand.

  ‘Enjoy y’all self,’ Caran said. ‘We heading home early. Urgent bizness.’ He cocked his chin at Mary and winked. She slapped him on the shoulder. I watched them walk away laughing.

  Inside, Ajamu was finishing off a hot and celebratory song. Tallpree’s voice, like a goat’s on steroids, slammed through. The building pulsed and rocked.

  Lonnie laid the hand of ownership on my arm, and as we wove through the women air-drying themselves outside, she slipped her fingers under my shirt and tightened them on the erector muscles of my lower back.

  We waded through the disco lights, ducked and sidestepped a forest of bump-n-grinding backsides until we found our own little pool of darkness in a corner of the hall.

  And we danced, Lonnie and I – her forehead resting against my sternum, me flushed with wonder at my luck, and how easily and sweetly this woman’s body folded into mine.

  We danced until the DJ simmered down the tempo with the easygoing strains of Gregory Isaacs’s ‘Bumping And Boring’.

  But then Lonnie was barely moving. Her body grew stiff, her fingers limp in my hand.

  ‘You want a drink?’

  She shook her head, flapped her wrist in front of her face. ‘Too hot in here. I want to go outside.’

  I turned for the door, glimpsed Malan, his back leaning against the counter, his elbows on the bar, a sad-faced girl in a light-green dress standing by his side. I lifted a finger at him. He nodded twice, turned to the girl and said something.

  I felt Lonnie’s impatient finger on my back. I pushed my way out, she following.

  She headed past me for the beach. I watched the stiffness of her head and shoulders. I caught up with her sitting under a sea-grape tree, face resting on her drawn-up knees.

  ‘What spook you, Lonnie?’ I said. ‘Because sure as hell…’

  She took my hand and tugged me down beside her. I leaned into her face, tried to hold her eyes. Lonnie looked away. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Digger, I jus’ getting to know you and I full-full-full ov love for you already. Becuz,’ she sniffed and wiped her eyes, ‘you make a pusson feel they worth someting.’

  ‘That what making you cry now?’

  She sprung to her feet, dusted herself, then passed a vigorous hand on the seat of my trousers. ‘Let’s go for a drive.’

  We drove in silence through Coburn Valley, then up the hills of Morne Bijoux, till we got to the highest fort above San Andrews.

  From Fort Frederick, all of the Drylands lay before us. San Andrews was directly below, steeped in the amber glare of its streetlights – the waters of the Carenage a black void except for the places where it became a shifting mirror for the lights of the town. Ahead was Salt Point, and the blaze of the airport whose runway thrust straight towards the sea, defined by a parallel string of white lights.

  I felt dizzy and dry-mouthed, knocked off my stride by the suddenness of Lonnie’s mood-swing.

  She dropped her hand on my lap, shifted her body towards me, her face tense and intent.

  I closed my eyes, took a breath and dropped my hand on hers.

  ‘Lonnie, I promise that you safe with me. I been in this job long enough to know that when it comes to what I going to ask you, a lotta wimmen don’t have the luxury of telling the truth, because the truth could cost them their life. So, they either say nothing or they lie. I don’t want you to lie for me. That’s going to spoil everything.’

  I turned to face her. ‘You either got something with Malan, or you had something with him. Y’all body language tell me that. Truth or lie?’

  She eased back on the seat and stared out of the window.

  ‘Okay, here’s the important question: anything going on between you and Malan now? I have to ask because I work with the fella. And besides, I just want to know.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You sure?’

  She shook her head again, emphatically.

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  I was at the photocopier next morning. Malan strolled over smiling.

  ‘Didn know you could dance, Digson.’

  ‘Now you know.’

  ‘How’s the Guinness?’

  ‘Guinness is a drink.’

  ‘I jus want to tell you no sweat, Digger – that’s all.’

  ‘About?’

  He sucked his teeth, ‘C’mon fella, I know she talk ’bout me.’

  ‘Nuh, I the one that talk about you.’

  ‘All I want to say is no sweat, y’unnerstand. I…’

  I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Something wrong with this conversation, Malan. You talk as if you done something to me. You didn’t.’

  ‘So, we awright, then?’

  ‘Why not? Like I say, something wrong with this conversation.’

  Pet had her eyes on us. Malan must have noticed because he swung round on his heels and walked back to his office.

  18

  I’d come back from England with the resolve to abandon the case around my mother. A
llow it to lie and die.

  After a winter of watching TV in a foreign country, it struck me that if DS Chilman thought we had a problem with missing people, I should show him the figures for the British.

  With ten million CCTV cameras watching every movement of its citizens night and day, two hundred and fifty thousand of them still went missing every year. By my calculations that meant about one person every three minutes.

  A thousand bodies lay in mortuaries across the country, many of them for years. Nobody knew them or came to claim them. What if I told Chilman that the British were better at tracing cars than locating missing people?

  I’d watched interviews with parents who’d dedicated the best part of their lifetime to looking for a missing child. I saw what it had done to them, how forensic they’d become in their interpretations of the details. How consumed – the same vacancy in their eyes that I observed in Iona; the same hanging on to the belongings of the missing – clothes that would no longer fit, bedrooms that remained untouched from the day the loved one left. These people had projected their lives into the absent dead, while outside the window of my flat above Peckham Road, people went to work, huddled in bus-stops, plugged themselves into Walkmans, argued, made love and laughed.

  So, I’d decided to bury the questions about my mother and live. But who was I fooling? In a different country, three thousand miles from home, I mistook distance for detachment; made myself believe I’d dropped it – until Miss Stanislaus arrived and we had our breakthrough with the Nathan case.

  I returned to the list of officers who would have worked with Boko Hurd, or would at least have known him. I’d checked the registry records for deaths dating back from the present to 1999. Boko’s name was not among them. He had not been issued with a passport in fifteen years. As far as I could tell, Boko Hurd was alive.

  I’d shortlisted fourteen former officers. I called their numbers. One was living with his daughter in Florida, another had moved to Trinidad, five had passed away. The next three fell silent for a long while, then began batting away my questions by aggressing me with their own. Exactly like Cornwall did.

  I got lucky with the eleventh. His name was Pablo John. He asked me to repeat my name, apologised for his hearing, then told me how to find his house.

  His wife led me through a small forest of blossoming okra plants to a slope of land where an old man was weeding sweet potatoes. He was over six foot tall without an ounce of fat on him. He had what looked like a little girl’s cloth hat perched on his head. He was rubbing his lower back and gesturing for me to come closer. ‘Can’t hear like I used to. Cricket ball, yunno – a bouncer. Fella bowl a compo, hit me right here.’ He stuck the cutlass in the soil and tapped the right side of his face. ‘These past coupla months, after all them years, I start feeling it. That’s not one helluva thing?’

  You can tell a decent person anywhere – something in their bearing and the openness of their face, I suppose.

  ‘Come siddown an lemme see how I could help you. The Rape Riot, you say?’

  ‘May 3rd, 1999.’

  ‘I ’member the day. I was up here. They post me here for seventeen years. In fact is here I meet my wife and is here she anchor me.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You one of the affected?’

  His words melted something in my stomach. I took a breath and nodded. ‘Yessir, I one of the affected.’

  ‘My advice is to leave it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He passed a hand across his face, considered a while, then nodded. ‘Go ahead, youngfella; I’ll do my best.’

  He did not know whether Boko Hurd was dead or alive and was not interested either way.

  ‘He give police a bad name,’ the old man said.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ I said.

  He frowned – a genuine look of puzzlement in his eyes.

  ‘Somebody had to give the orders,’ I said. ‘Somebody above him. There is always a line of command.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the Commissioner…’

  He lifted a staying hand and shook his head.

  ‘Nuh, Sonny – what you don’t understand is that in them days, the line of command didn always end up where you expect it to. The order didn’t come from the force. I could swear to that.’

  He held my gaze. ‘Ain’ got one officer I know who wasn’t asking questions after the Rape Riot. Not one. And if that order did come from our superiors, we would’ve known. Even I used to know what go on inside the Governor General house – the Governor General, yunno! Far less! Because police talk among themselves.’

  ‘I dug up the list of the men deployed that day – the initials that is. As far as I surmised, they were all officers, including Boko Hurd, the armourer at the time.’

  He nodded dreamily. ‘You right about Boko, he was on the payroll. He come in and out ov any station on the island as if he own it. Used to boast h’was protected, and he was.’

  He frowned and threw me a direct curious gaze. ‘You say you sure about the others?’

  I told him I had no hard evidence.

  He nodded. Boko Hurd, he said, was one of a group of thirty men from different parishes who answered only to the man who believed he owned the island in those days.

  Boko did not just look after the weapons, he went out of his way to use them. He was good with guns, carried a stainless steel Czech-machined CZ-75 pistol, gifted to him on a training trip to Chile. He used to boast that he never wasted a shot.

  It was his idea, during the troubles of ’74, to commandeer two truckloads of bottled Coca Cola, stand them in the hot sun, then throw them into the crowd of protesting school children.

  ‘Ever seen a glass bottle of hot Coca Cola explode?’ the old man said. ‘Same as a grenade. Is Pinochet police that teach im that.’

  He raised the hat and fanned his face, the gray eyebrows twitching as if they had a life of their own.

  ‘The Rape Riot…’

  ‘Boko wouldn ha’ missed it for nothing. Not even if you tie him down. Yuh see, Boko got a chance to shoot. In fact, the fella never stop talking about the Rape Riot afterwards, for months. Even after they try to kill im. Coupla days after the riot, somebody run a van straight at him in front San Andrews Station. Revenge, yunno.’

  ‘So he got away?’

  The old man nodded. ‘Almost lost a leg, though. A good doctor save it. Boko didn walk straight after that.’

  ‘You said he talked a lot about it afterwards. Remember what he said?’

  The old man shrugged, ‘Crazy talk – that’s all I remember. Boko talk crazy after that. The only thing that stay with me was what them fellas say he called them wimmen. It didn’ make no sense to me.’

  ‘Tell me, Sir.’

  ‘Chalk.’

  ‘Chalk?’

  ‘Yes, chalk. I never forget that.’

  I stood up, dusted the seat of my trousers. ‘Sorry, Missa John, but I have to ask you, I take it that you were not present at the riot?’

  He shook his head. ‘I was in the hospital with my wife. The trouble happen same day that my first child born. Rape Riot Day is my first daughter’ birthday. That’s why I can’t forget it.’

  I took the breakneck mountain road up the Grand Etang Hills. The first time Chilman made me drive up it with his car, I came out of it dizzy. At the peak I pulled into a small gravelled area that sloped down to the depths of the dripping rain forest, now ill-defined and ghostly in the rolling mists.

  A strong wind pushed against the car and even with all the windows closed, the chill still crept in.

  I wrote a summary of what Pablo John told me. I drew asterisks beside the things I thought significant. And gradually, in this place of strangeness and discomfort, as I reread my notes I felt better. The old man might have given me a way to find Boko after all, not by what he said about the armourer, but by what he told me about himself and the cricket ball that struck him.

  His was the story of eve
ry ageing person I knew. The body remembers. The knocks and traumas of youth are written there and resurface with old age. And Boko with his shattered leg…

  I went straight to the hospital.

  The nurse in Admin looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. She went to a shelf of folders and ran an index along their spines. ‘Say the name again?’

  ‘Buckman Hurd. Bad left leg. He come for check-up, sometimes, not so?’

  ‘You know his address?’

  ‘That’s what I come to find out,’ I said.

  ‘Got a lotta people on this island with bad leg, yunno.’ She found something in what she said amusing, because she was chuckling.

  ‘We could narrow it down lil bit,’ I said. ‘He’s 68, male; besides, is a left leg we looking for.’

  ‘You funny,’ she chuckled. ‘This should be him, then.’ She pulled a folder, dropped it on the desk, began leafing through the file. ‘You want his history?’

  ‘I know enough already. Just where he live will do.’

  ‘Last consultation June 6th – that make it…’

  ‘Nine weeks two days,’ I said. ‘Where he live?’ She looked up at me quickly before turning back to the pages.

  ‘Woman by the name of Edna Greene bring him in every couple of months or so. We have her down as his carer.’ She straightened up. ‘He live in Drylands South. The housing scheme.’

  ‘Thanks, Miss, erm…’

  ‘Carol.’

  ‘Miss Carol, you should get some sleep.’

  I gave her my best smile and walked out.

  19

  Boko Hurd lived in the only social housing scheme on the island. Before I was born, Drylands South was the island’s idea of pulling itself into the modern age. There was an abandoned open-air cinema with its rotten billboard still standing after forty years, its car park now a pasture for grazing sheep and cattle. It backed the two-lane highway – half a mile of asphalt that was four times the width of the average island road; pot-holed now, but wide and straight enough for drivers to convince themselves it was a runway. The Traffic Department had a special file that kept a running total of the numbers killed on it each year.

  There was an old sugar mill that used to be a disco at the roundabout; and the beer factory, of course, overlooking the two-lane road, with shiny steel chimneys that filled the air with the smell of hops and malted barley.