Death in the Caribbean, page 7
If I could get nowhere with my thinking, the Grand Duchess was making remarkably good progress with our voyage. She must certainly have been doing seven knots, for it was barely two hours after our departure from Naurataka when Captain Amos pointed to the headland that marked the entrance to the Chacarima Inlet. ‘We have about two miles to go,’ he said, ‘and I think I’d better take her now, for I know the entrance. It is not difficult, but the Carima River sometimes runs strongly, and there are some tricky currents where it meets the sea.’
Ruth had gone forrard and was holding on to one of the foremast shrouds, watching the coast as we stood in. I joined her, and we stood together as we rounded the headland and opened the entrance to the inlet. The Grand Duchess came off the wind as she turned to go in, and the skipper ordered the staysail handed, and the bigger of her two jibs. He let out the remaining sheets, and she ran sweetly into the inlet. It was about half a mile wide, and we had about a mile to go to reach the anchorage for the caves. We anchored in about five fathoms off a beach of brilliant white sand. It was just on ten o’clock.
Adam the butler came up to us. ‘Breakfast will be ready in an hour, sir,’ he said. ‘There is not time to go to the caves before breakfast. Would you and madam like to take a swim now, and go ashore after breakfast? It is safe to swim here. Sharks hardly ever come into the inlet, but we shall have a lookout, of course.’
‘I’d love to go in,’ Ruth said. ‘I’ve never seen water of such a brilliant colour – it will be like swimming in the sky.’
Through the saloon, the Grand Duchess had four small cabins, two to starboard, two to port. One was allotted to me and one to Ruth. We changed quickly and went back on deck. Some boarding steps had been lowered to make it easy for us to get to the water, but Ruth dived in straight from the deck. She dived beautifully, and swam like a fish. Her dark hair gleaming in the sunlight on blue water, she waved to me. I am not all that brilliant as a diver, but I couldn’t go in from a ladder when she had dived from the deck. So I followed her, mercifully without making too ungainly a splash. ‘I’ll race you to the beach,’ I said. She was a much more graceful swimmer than I, but she hadn’t my strength, and I’m glad to say that I won, though not by much. Honour satisfied, we walked a little way up the beach and found a rock to sit on.
‘This is what I call a real vacation,’ she said.
‘You’re a beautiful swimmer.’
‘Well, when I was a kid my parents had a little summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I used to spend most of our time there in the water. I didn’t know you could handle a schooner.’
‘I told you that I was brought up in small boats.’
‘I don’t call the Grand Duchess small. I thought you did very well.’
‘I thought you stayed below eating bananas.’
‘Well, I kept an eye on you. I thought, perhaps, I’d have to take to swimming earlier.’
‘We’d better get back to the lunch they call breakfast – if you haven’t eaten too many bananas to spoil your appetite.’
*
The beach to which Ruth and I had swum was enclosed in a small bay on the northern shore of the Chacarima Inlet. The western end of the bay was a steep cliff, and beyond the cliff was the sea entrance to the caves. The anchorage off the beach was about a quarter of a mile from the caves. We went in the Grand Duchess’s dinghy, a tough twelve-foot boat, clinker-built, and equipped with an outboard engine. Only Adam, Ruth and I went – Captain Amos and his crew obviously had no wish to go near the place. We were provided with a lantern torch apiece, and two big acetylene lamps. We also took a coil of line.
The outboard was well maintained, and fired at once. The trip round the cliff to the entrance took only a few minutes. I kept my eyes open for any sign of other people, but there was none. If the mysterious light of last night had been a vessel making for the Chacarima Inlet, she was gone.
I was astonished by the sheer size of the entrance – it was the most enormous archway I had ever seen. What from the little beach had seemed to be a cliff was the scarp of a hillside, or rather range of hills, thickly wooded, and climbing to at least 3,000 feet. The hills fell steeply to the sea – beyond our little beach there were no more beaches, but steep-to, perpendicular cliffs. Penetrating into these cliffs was an arm of the sea, entering through an arch at least 200 yards wide, and certainly several hundred feet high.
‘Is this the sea, or the mouth of the Carima River?’ I asked Adam.
‘It is both, sir,’ he said. ‘The river goes underground about three miles away. How it flows through the caves no one knows. Here, at the mouth, the water is still salt, and it is salt for as far inside as I have ever been, so the sea goes in a long way.’
Adam was at the tiller. He took us in through the middle of the arch, and then throttled back, so that we went on quite slowly. The arch was so huge that there was light for some distance inside, but it gradually grew dimmer, and when we got to a natural rock quay that was used as a landing place, it was like being inside an unlighted cathedral at dusk. As our eyes grew accustomed to the dimness we could see well enough to get ashore. There was an iron ring let into the rock, and Adam tied the boat to this. ‘It was put in by Mr Caval’s father,’ he said. ‘He liked to bring visitors to the caves.’
The rock at this point was low enough to climb on to, and once up we were on a rock ledge, about ten or a dozen feet wide. Adam lit both the acetylene lamps. He placed one on the rock above the boat, ‘So that we can see to come back,’ he said. He took the other himself, and gave torches to Ruth and me. Leading the way with the big acetylene lamp he began to walk along the ledge towards the interior of the cavern.
It was easy going for about a quarter of a mile. The ledge remained wide, and climbed quite gently. We were following the sea – or the river. I shone my torch downwards every now and again, and saw that though we were steadily gaining height above sea level we were still at the water’s edge. Then we came to a jumble of broken rock, blocking the ledge. ‘It is possible to climb the rocks,’ Adam said, ‘and then there is a sort of path continuing into the mountain. But it is a stiff climb, and there is nothing to see. We will go to the right – do you see a sort of doorway between two rocks? There is a good path beyond it, into another part of the caves.’
We followed him through this gap in the rocks, Ruth next to him, and I bringing up the rear. The path narrowed, and began to climb more steeply, but it was still quite easy walking. Geologically it was a weird formation – rather like a chimney that you meet in rock-climbs, but obviously not a fault running through the rock because it did not go to the bottom of the cliff but ended in a firm ledge between rock walls, the ledge on which we were walking. And it did not go to the top, because it was roofed. How high above us the rock roof was I could not make out – I shone my torch upwards, but the beam could not reach wherever the roof might be. I could only assume that we were in a sort of steep tunnel, cut by water in some remote past.
Again we came to a rockfall, and again we could continue by making a dog-leg turn to the right. Now the path was much narrower – in places barely eighteen inches wide – and much steeper. And we began to hear a noise, a bit like that of an express train in the distance. As we went on the noise got louder, and suddenly our path came to an end, with two iron bars placed across it. The bars guarded a sheer drop of Heaven knows what depth. Adam shone his acetylene lamp downwards, and there, far below, was water. Then he turned the lamp to the left, and Ruth and I simply gasped with wonder. We were looking at a cliff of moving water, where the Carima River plunged over some underground precipice to form a tremendous waterfall. How wide it was I could not tell, for the light could not reach across it. The waterfall formed one side of a gigantic cavern, with the river at the bottom. No roof, no other wall was visible. The river seemed to me to be flowing to the right, that is, away from the sea entrance to the caves, but presumably it twisted and turned underground to get there. The waterfall, the cavern, and the whole surroundings of the place were so stupendous that I didn’t realise for a moment that Adam was speaking. I had to make a deliberate effort of will to bring myself back to listen to him. ‘These bars are also the work of Mr Caval’s father,’ he said. ‘Many years ago, when the present Mr Caval and I were boys, there was a tragedy when a visitor to Chacarima fell over. He was never seen again – the river took his body as well as his spirit. So Mr Caval put the bars to protect visitors. He had to do the work himself, helped by Mr Edward and me, for people said that the river would not like it. I do not know if it is so. There are not many visitors. I do not much like coming here, but Mr Caval asked me to take you, and I am glad that you have seen the most wonderful sight in Nueva, perhaps in the whole world. There is no more to see. If you are ready, let us now return to the boat.’
I should have liked to go down into the cavern, but it would have required ropes and climbing equipment, and better lighting than we had. Also, it was clear that Adam was on tenterhooks to get away. So we reversed ourselves for Adam to lead the way down, I again bringing up the rear, about half a dozen yards behind Ruth.
When we got to the first dog-leg turn – that is, the second turn of our ascent – I stopped for a moment to examine the rockfall that blocked the chimney leading away from the sea cave. The jumble of rocks seemed quite natural, and I was about to move on when my torch shone on something that looked like a fragment of cloth. It was caught under a boulder. I tried to pick it up, but it wouldn’t come away. I looked more closely, and saw that it was the hem of a pair of khaki shorts. Then I realised that there was a leg clothed by the shorts, and the rest of a body under the rubble of stones.
Ruth and Adam hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped, and, walking downhill, were forty to fifty yards ahead. I called out to them, my shout echoing eerily in the tomb-like passage. They came back, Ruth running, Adam following her reluctantly.
Ruth’s torch, added to the light from mine, showed that the boulder covered all the lower part of a body except for a small area of one leg, just above the knee. Above the boulder was a heap of smaller stones. ‘Bring the big lamp,’ I called to Adam.
The powerful acetylene beam illuminated the whole pile of rocks and stones. As soon as he saw the leg Adam screamed, ‘Don’t touch it, Colonel sir. The river is angry. We must go at once.’
‘We can’t go. There’s probably nothing we can do, but we can move those small stones from his chest and face. It’s just conceivable that he’s still alive. We can’t leave him until we know.’
Adam was trembling so much that the acetylene lamp wavered, and I thought he was going to drop it. I took it from him, and stood it on a rock. Then I put an arm round Adam’s shoulders, and helped him to sit down. ‘Try not to worry, old chap,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘The river has no reason to be angry with us – maybe it brought us here to help.’
The old man just moaned.
Leaving him sitting on the ground, his back propped against a wall of the passage, I turned to the stones. ‘Can you hold both torches, Ruth?’ I said. ‘I must see if I can uncover his head.’
Ruth was splendid. She didn’t need to be asked where to direct the beams, but shone them precisely where I needed them. Estimating from the position of the leg roughly where the head would be, I climbed over the big boulder and lifted away the rubble of smaller stones. I started a bit too low, for I began by uncovering his chin. I soon had the rest of the face uncovered, and then it was apparent that we could indeed do nothing. The man, a white man, was unquestionably dead, and there was a bullet wound in his left temple.
He was lying on his back, so that the light of the torches was full on his face. But only for a moment. Suddenly they wavered as Ruth collapsed. ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no,’ she said as she passed out.
Scrambling down to go to Ruth, I knocked away a few more stones from the man’s chest, uncovering a shirt pocket. In it was a small black notebook. Without really thinking what I was doing I put it in my own pocket.
V
ON THE RUN
I HAD NO water, but I rubbed Ruth’s hands, and in a minute or two she sat up. ‘Sorry, Peter,’ she said. ‘What do we do now?’
‘The first thing is to see what we can do for Adam. He seems in a bad way.’
The old butler wasn’t sitting, but rather slumped on the path, and his head had fallen forward. I slipped my hand under his shirt, but could feel no heartbeat. His eyes were closed. Gently I lifted one of his eyelids, but there was no response. ‘I’m horribly afraid that he’s gone, too,’ I said. ‘Let’s get him lying down properly, and I’ll see if I can massage his heart.’
I took off my own shirt, folded it to make a pillow, and laid the old man’s head on it. Ruth and I then straightened his limbs. He had certainly stopped breathing. Recalling what I could of first aid courses in the Army I tried giving him the so-called ‘kiss of life’, but he did not respond. Then I tried massaging his chest and rib cage. We worked away for half an hour, but it was no good: the angry river had claimed another victim.
‘I suppose we could get him back to the boat, but without a stretcher it would be an appalling job,’ I said. ‘And it would take a long time. The best thing now is for us to go back to try to get help. Also, the body under the stones must be reported as soon as possible.’
I put on my shirt again, we laid out the old man as decently as we could, and set off back to the boat. This time I went first, carrying the acetylene lamp and one of the torches. Ruth kept very close behind me. There was no difficulty about finding the way – we had simply to follow the path, and turn through the rock opening that led to the ledge by the sea. I had a private panic that somehow we might miss this opening, but we didn’t – there was no other way to go. All the same it was with a sense of infinite relief that we found ourselves back in the great sea cave, and saw the light from the other acetylene lamp left by the boat. We ran the rest of the way to it. It was sheer heaven to be in the boat, returning to daylight and the clean sea. The Grand Duchess, lying peacefully at anchor, seemed almost too good to be true.
Captain Amos met us at the top of the boarding ladder. He could see that there was something wrong. Why was Adam not with us? I explained hurriedly, and asked if he and two of the crew would come back with us to recover Adam’s body. ‘We can rig a stretcher out of a piece of sail and two oars,’ I said.
To my bewilderment – and anger – Captain Amos flatly refused to come. ‘The river is angry after the earthquake,’ he said. ‘It is not good for anybody to go into the caves. Look what has happened to Mr Adam.’
There was nothing for it but to accept the situation, but it was a problem to know what best to do. The Grand Duchess had no radio. She did, however, have a map, and from the map it seemed that the sugar mill and offices of the Chacarima Estate were not much more than three miles from the head of the Chacarima Inlet. I asked Captain Amos if he would put me ashore there, and then take Ruth and the schooner back to Naurataka. From the sugar mill I could at least telephone the authorities at Fort James and report what had happened.
He agreed to this. Ruth wanted to come with me, but it seemed better that she should go back to Mr Caval. Also, although the map showed a track running from the inlet to the sugar mill, the whole area was thickly forested, and I had no idea what the track was like. Captain Amos let me take the map, and I had the small wrist compass that I had put on that morning – I wear it as automatically as my watch whenever I go off anywhere.
One of the sailors put me ashore, and took the boat back to the Grand Duchess. I did not wait to see her leave, but struck off into the bush.
The main stream of the Carima River apparently ran into the caves, but there was a river, about twenty yards wide, at the head of the inlet. I remembered that we had to cross a river to get from Chacarima House to the sugar mill, and I made sure of landing on the side of the river that I reckoned the mill to be on. I needed the compass. There was indeed a track of sorts, but it was much overgrown, and met various other trails – possibly drinking trails by which animals got to the river. The track climbed steeply, but although it was hard going the climb turned out to be a help, for when I got to the ridge I could see the chimney of the sugar mill, and after that there was no chance of going wrong.
On the walk I wondered what to do. The office manager would know how to get hold of the police, but how quickly they would act I didn’t know. I decided to ring the private number that the Prime Minister had given me – murder in what to him was a sensitive area of the island certainly justified the use of it.
The manager remembered me. He showed horror and shock at my story, and at once took me to a telephone. The Nuevan telephone service, at least between Chacarima and Fort James, was better than I expected, and I got through in less than five minutes. What is more, I got through to the Prime Minister himself. He let me speak without asking any questions. Then he said, ‘This may be exceedingly important. I will send out the Chief of Police, and also, I think, a small detachment of the Army straightaway. Can you wait at the Chacarima mill until they get there?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
Feeling that I’d done what I could, I then tried to telephone Caval at Naurataka. But in this I was less successful. After being asked repeatedly to hold on, a telephone voice finally told me that there was trouble on the line, and that it was unlikely that a call could be got through that day. ‘I am afraid it often happens so,’ the manager said. ‘Part of the line runs through the forest, and branches fall on it. Often it is quicker to go by road to Naurataka than to try to telephone.’ I considered asking him to send a man with a note to Caval, but it seemed pointless – Ruth would get back by sea long before anyone could get there by road.
*
The road from Fort James to the inhabited district of Chacarima was quite good, and a staff car and two jeeps turned up before I was expecting them. They seemed to be all Army, no police. An immaculate young captain got out of the car. ‘Colonel Blair?’ he asked.
