Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (3 page)

I went into my tiny damp bathroom and ran hot water into the sink. Staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I looked every one of my forty-two years. I’d a little grey hair around my temples, and the small half-inch scar that ran along the left side of my brow had faded little since my sister, Bernie, had thrown a broken conch shell at me when we were playing catch as kids.

Opening the medicine cabinet, I took out my cut-throat razor, shaving brush and soap and sank the brush into the water before lathering it. I painted my jowls in the lightly scented suds, took my blade and let it glide across my face. It took me all of three or so minutes to shave.

I threw the now lukewarm water over my face and took a bar of soap from the edge of the sink and rubbed under my arms and chest with it, using the remaining water to rinse before drying myself off with a navy-blue hand towel.

Returning to my bedroom, I took from the wardrobe my grey herringbone tweed jacket, a white cotton shirt, charcoal tapered cuffed trousers and a pair of black leather plain-toe derby brogues, and quickly got myself dressed. The only items of luxury clothing I possessed were an Aquascutum overcoat and a black felt trilby hat, both hung in the hall and which had been invaluable these last few days in keeping me dry.

Walking over to the window, I wiped away some of the condensation with the flat of my hand and looked out down onto the snow-filled street below, which was unsurprisingly quiet. My thoughts turned to breakfast, my guts churning. I didn’t have anything in to eat, but I knew exactly where I could get my fill of the best food in St Pauls even this early on a Sunday. Picking up the brown envelope, I pulled out Stella Hopkins’ photograph and placed it on my dressing table, then took the two fivers out, unfolded the bills and put them into my wallet, before putting it into the breast pocket of my jacket. I went into the hall, picked my keys off the hook, and grabbed my hat and overcoat from the stand before heading straight out of the door to pay a visit to my uncle Gabe and aunt Pearl.

Gabe and his wife, Pearl, lived on Banner Road, just three streets away from my place. Their rented Victorian-built double-bay home was the bolthole I’d run to when I found myself short of a few pounds or if I needed the taste of some home cooking. They’d lived in the house since Gabe had left the army, renting it from the same miserly landlord who owned my digs. Along with my sister Bernie back home, my cousin Victor and his parents were the only family I had. Gabe was my father’s brother and they looked a helluva lot like each other. My own papa had been dead for over twenty years, but Gabe and Pearl treated me like one of their own. Their front door was never locked, and I made my way up the three granite steps, which my aunt Pearl scrubbed every other day, and went inside without knocking.

“Hey Gabe, Pearl, where you both at?” I shouted down the hallway.

“Joseph, is that you, boss man?” Gabe called from his kitchen.

“Sure is. Man, it is freezing out there.” I beat at my arms with my hands, the watery snowflakes falling from my coat onto the hard wood floor in my aunt Pearl’s hallway. I kicked off my shoes, the soles sodden from the sleet and ice, and I took off my hat and coat and hung them on the top of the banister at the foot of their stairs before finding the two of them sitting at their dining table.

The old black Aga was thankfully throwing out some heat; a pot of cornmeal porridge bubbled gently away on the back. I pulled up a chair and drew it in towards the table, directing my wet feet at the warmth of the metal range. I patted at my stomach with the flat of my palm and stared over at my aunt’s breakfast pans. My hunger settled over the room like a shroud on a corpse.

“There ain’t no need axing why you here at this time in the marning, I suppose you’ll be wantin’ me to cook you up some eggs?” my aunt Pearl asked me as she rose from her chair, already knowing what my reply would be.

Her accent was deep, rich Bajan. Our language, to those not familiar with it, could sound stern and authoritarian, but to me its lilting tones were a gentle reminder of happier times from my childhood. My years with the Barbadian police force had clipped my own use of our mother tongue, the service preferring its men to replicate the speech of its British Metropolitan counterparts here in the UK.

“You know I ain’t gonna say no to you, Pearl. Eggs sound good to me. How about you bringing me some of that fine cornmeal pap.” I rubbed my hands together in eager anticipation. I felt like a child again, eleven years old, sat around my mama’s table waiting to get fed. I forgot the cold and smelt the exotic aromas of the Caribbean rising from my aunt’s old metal cooking pan.

Pearl dished me up a bowl of the steaming hot cereal, which she had sprinkled on top with cinnamon, and brought it over to me along with a spoon. Back home we called it “pap” because of its thick consistency. It looked like baby food, but thankfully didn’t taste like it. Pearl returned to her stove and cracked two hen’s eggs into a black iron skillet and gently began to fry them while I filled my face.

“So what you gotta tell us, Joseph? You dressed real sharp, brother,” Gabe said, lifting his head outta his newspaper as he spoke to me. He was one of the few people who used my given name; Pearl, what was left of my family, and the few friends I had always called me JT.

“I’ve been offered work, but I’m not sure if it’s fo’ me, Gabe. That’s why I came over; I wanted to run it by you.”

“You did? When did you need me tell you to take a job? You sure as hell need the money, that’s fo’ damn sure.”

“I’d be working fo’ a guy named Earl Linney.” I waited for Gabe’s reaction, unsure of how he’d take the news. Historically, Jamaicans looked upon the other, smaller Caribbean islands with disdain, calling our home in Barbados one of the “little” islands. It was fair to say there was no love lost between the two peoples when it came to the hierarchy of our individual atolls.

My uncle Gabe was distrusting by nature and I could tell that he was not impressed by the possibility of me being employed by the wealthy Jamaican politician. I watched the old man sit back in his old armchair and prepared myself for a grilling.

“The alderman, what the hell kinda work a man like Earl Linney got fo’ you? You ain’t an airplane engineer and you know nuttin’ ’bout pol’tics,” Gabe snapped at me sharply.

I didn’t reply and quickly skirted over my uncle’s aggressive questioning, changing tack a little and perhaps digging a bigger hole for myself at the same time as I offered up a little more information to him as to the real nature of my new job offer.

“Gabe, you read ’bout a young woman from Montpelier go missing a short while back? Name’s Stella Hopkins?” I asked him gingerly, then wished that I hadn’t.

“We heard,” Aunt Pearl interrupted. “Pastor at our church, he got us pray’in fo’ her. You axe me, that poor ting she in the ground.”

“Nobody knows that, Pearl; just cus she not been around, don’t mean she dead,” Gabe growled back at his wife.

“Well, you tell me where that girl walking ’bout then?” Pearl was having none of her husband’s bullishness. Nevertheless, my uncle Gabe continued to make his point.

“Woman, it ain’t fo’ lack a tongue that a horse can’t talk. Ain’t no good sayin’ that she’s dead when you don’t know a damn ting.”

“Well, I read ’bout that poor child in that paper you go poking through every night. She ain’t been seen fo’ over a week, where she be then, you tell me?”

Gabe sat in silence, knowing better than to continue the argument with Aunt Pearl, a battle of words in which he would not be finally victorious.

Pearl picked up my empty bowl with one hand and placed a plate of fried eggs in front of me with her other. She had sliced some bread that she had recently baked and put it onto another, smaller tea plate along with the butter dish.

“Help yourself, I’ll bring you some coffee,” she said, her finger pointing at the bread and butter as she spoke.

“Thanks, Aunt Pearl, my belly sure is grateful to you.” I soft-soaped the old lady and began to tuck into my breakfast.

Pearl walked back to the kitchen sink, shaking her head and mumbling to herself ’bout how my uncle Gabe had “hard ears”, that he didn’t listen to her. I could see her point of view, but Gabe’s sixty-three years had made him wise. He was a thinker, calm, reflective. Everything his dead brother, my papa, wasn’t.

“He wants me to ask around this area, but kinda on the sly, Gabe, if you know what I mean?”

“Oh, I know what you mean. But you needs to be axing yo’self, why’s the man need you to do his donkey work on the sly, Joseph? He’s a big enough fella, he should be doing his own sniffing around if you axe me. Someting stinks to high heaven ’bout the whole story.”

Gabe was on a roll, there was no way I was going to get him off of his soapbox. I was regretting that I’d ever opened my big mouth.

“An’ another ting. If Linney wants this Hopkins girl finding, then you tell me why he not gone to the police?”

My uncle Gabe was fishing for the truth. But I had none to give him; I could only offer up what the shady councillor had already told me. As I retold the alderman’s tale to my uncle, I felt his words were already making a liar out of me.

“Linney said that he’d been to the local law, Gabe, says they’ve come up with nothing. The man knew I’d been on the force back home on Barbados, thought I may be able to help. Poke around without upsetting folk. He said he was prepared to pay me well fo’ that kinda help.”

“Yeah, is that so . . . You know that’s the first ting I’d be worrying ’bout if I was you. When a man offers you big money fo’ work he don’t wanna touch himself, that either means he’s damn lazy or he’s lying ’bout what kinda job you’re gonna end up doin’ fo’ him. Just remember: man needs money, but he also needs to be able to sleep at night once he’s earned it. You be sure you can do that, Joseph, just be sure.”

It was the kind of good advice I knew was worth taking, but sometimes, the advice from those who love us dearly is also the most difficult to accept. And in not heeding their words of warning and making those fateful mistakes, our fall from grace in their eyes is so much harder to bear.

Today I was again about to ignore the words of the wise. My own previous fall from grace, which until now had been a well-kept secret, was to return to haunt me as I looked into the eyes of my elderly relation. It was a darkly clandestine past that my uncle and I never spoke of.

I didn’t speak of the missing girl or my involvement with Earl Linney to Gabe and Pearl again while we sat finishing our coffees. I felt I’d disturbed the calm of their Sunday morning with my talk of Stella Hopkins and the up-front easy money Linney had paid me to find her.

Gabe saw the world and those who lived in it simply. You were either good or bad, and I got the feeling he thought that the Jamaican politician didn’t fit into either of those categories. Gabe had said his piece and in doing so had heightened my distrust of Earl Linney’s motives and made me question whether he’d been straight with me.

I’d promised Pearl that I’d drop by on Wednesday evening, her invite to supper too good to miss. I thanked her for breakfast, grabbed my coat and hat, and kissed her cheek before turning to Gabe, who had returned to reading his newspaper. He’d just lit up a cigar and was drawing on it before blowing out plumes of grey smoke around the kitchen. I could tell he wasn’t happy about my involvement with the alderman and the flash up-front cash he’d handed over. He sat with a face like an angry old goat that was ready to butt his way out of a farmyard pen. I approached my curmudgeonly relation cautiously before speaking.

“Hey Gabe, you have any idea where Vic is?”

“That boy was up with the lark, said he was going to meet Carnell Harris at Perry’s gym down on Grosvenor Street, they shifting someting or other down there.”

He sucked some more on his stogie and shuffled uncomfortably in his chair, aggressively shaking the opened pages of his newspaper out in front of him in frustration at my continuing probing as to the whereabouts of his nefariously felonious child.

“So you ain’t expecting him back any time soon?” The overeagerness of my questioning had started to provoke my uncle to become suspicious of my motives in wanting to meet up with his son. Gabe was guarded in his reply and was in his own way protecting me as much as he was his own boy. The old man knew that when Vic and I got together we had a habit of finding trouble for ourselves.

“Vic makes up the rules as he goes along. He could be back tonight or it could be tomorrow night. Vic’s never lived by God’s time.” Gabe shook his head at me, a look of weary resignation on his face as he considered for a moment what criminal activity his wayward offspring may be up to.

He knew Vic was as cunning as a fox, handy with his fists and could take care of himself, and yet he worried constantly for his child’s well-being. He was the kind of father I wished I’d had, and after my own old man’s untimely death he’d done his very best for me. The thought of worrying about both Vic and myself was clearly a great strain upon my uncle and it showed in his manner. He deserved better from the two of us, and a wave of shame crashed over me, dragging at my heart like a lead weight.

“OK, thanks, both. I’m going to try and catch up with Vic at Perry’s.”

I could see that Gabe was getting increasingly agitated. I’d spooked him by bringing into his home the prospect of misfortune and possibly implicating Vic in it. As I turned to leave, he called out to me, his voice now sombre and full of troubled concern. He stared up at me, his watery eyes piercing into my own.

“Joseph, you know that Vic dodges round the darker sides o’ life without you pushin’ him further toward it. Think about that real hard befo’ you start on someting with him you may end up regretting.”

The old goat was way ahead of me.

“I just wanted to git together with my cousin, Gabe. Maybe git a drink in the Jamaica Inn at lunchtime. This family gotta stay tight. You know that.”

But the old man wasn’t sold on my upbeat patter. He saw through the lie I’d just told him and was still suspicious of my true intent as to why I wanted to find my kin so urgently.