CHAPTER TWELVE

Cayman Kai was a cove on the wooded north side of the island, close to Rum Point beach. Nick Chapman’s home had been a simple, elegant white bungalow with a broad veranda, surrounded by trees and privately situated at the side of a narrow coastal inlet with its own boat dock.

The place was all in darkness. As Ben got out of the car, he could hear music and laughter wafting across on the breeze from the nearby restaurant on Rum Point. He glanced around him: nobody was about, and the nearest neighbours were a good distance away beyond the whispering trees. He tried the front door, then the back. Finding them both locked, he turned his attention to the window catches: exactly the flimsy low-security kind of affair he’d have expected to find on an island with one of the lowest crime rates on the planet. In moments, he was inside.

The window he’d come through was that of the master bedroom. Ben stood perfectly immobile and utterly silent for a long time in the shadows, listening to the sounds of the house, hearing no sign of movement from anywhere. He reached into his pocket for the mini-Maglite he’d bought earlier in George Town, and cast the strong, thin beam of light around the room.

A mosquito net shrouded the double bed. A vase of dying flowers stood on the bedside table. On one white wall hung a large framed Escher print, the one with the never-ending staircase. On the opposite wall hung a picture of Nick and his team standing grinning next to a Cayman Air Charter Trislander on a grassy airfield. The aircraft had a pearly white new paint job and everyone looked ready to burst with excitement. This must have been CIC’s inaugural launch. Nick himself looked tanned and fit and immensely proud.

Below that one was a photo portrait of Hilary, aged about fifteen, together with another from her graduation day.

Ben felt strange, and a little ashamed, to be breaking into the home of his dead friend. He left the bedroom and moved on through the house, treading quietly and cautiously, darting the torch beam as he went.

The police didn’t seem to have turned the place over too roughly looking for clues. Everything was more or less tidy, down to the perfectly-squared rugs on the tiled floors and the ordered arrangement of cushions on the living room sofa. Most of the walls were covered with photos of the bright golden-yellow Sea Otter and other aircraft, as well as a collection of spectacular aerial shots of the island that showed the depth of Nick’s passion for the place.

Satisfied that he was completely alone, Ben spent some time in Nick’s study, holding the shaft of the mini-Maglite between his teeth to sift through the papers in the drawers of the large antique desk, in the hope that he might find something the cops had missed.

He’d no real idea what he was looking for, but searching made him nervous. There was a lingering anxiety at the back of his mind that no amount of rational denial could completely erase: the fear of uncovering some evidence that Nick had been in the kind of trouble from which only suicide offered a refuge – irredeemable debts, maybe – or signs that the depression had returned.

What if – just what if – Nick really had ended his own life? The thought made Ben’s mind swim. Then what had happened to Hilary? Was her death some bizarre coincidence? Like the fact that someone on this island obviously didn’t like Ben going around asking questions? And if Nick hadn’t killed himself, then what was the alternative? For all the hours Ben had spent going over and over it in his mind, he could think of nothing.

There was nothing in Nick’s desk, either. No demands from the bank, no nasty letters threatening litigation, no doctor’s prescriptions or empty pill bottles, no telltale Prozac capsule rolling loose in the bottom of a drawer. All Ben found among Nick’s business documents were routine bits of paperwork and correspondence that gave the impression that CIC wasn’t just solvent, it was booming. Inside a Manila file were some preliminary architect sketches for a major extension to the office buildings at West End, and a letter giving an estimated completion date in eight months’ time. Ben studied the sketches and shook his head. Did people suffering from chronic depression make plans like this?

The bottom drawer contained Nick’s private papers. Ben went through them guiltily. No sign of a Last Will and Testament. A cheery letter from Hilary, dated six months ago, with a few snaps of her on holiday somewhere with a girlfriend. An assortment of receipts and product guarantees. A handwritten list of forty or so names, headed ‘party guests’.

A man contemplating suicide, planning a big get-together?

Ben put everything back as he’d found it and started going through the address book by the phone. Again, he could find nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing, except for the somewhat cryptic phone number at the back of the book. It had no name next to it, only a capital letter T that had been heavily circled as though it had some special significance.

Ben used his own phone to dial the number, and got straight through to an answering service. He switched off before the message prompt.

That was when he heard the click of a key turning in the front door lock, followed by the padding of tentative footsteps in the hallway outside the study. The beam of a torch swept by, shining under the crack in the door.

Ben turned off his Maglite. He crouched behind the desk, completely still and silent in the darkness.

The footsteps stopped right outside the study. Someone reached out and nudged the door half open. Torchlight shone inside the room.

And from the source of the brilliant white beam, there was the unmistakable metallic click-clunk of a well-oiled revolver mechanism being cocked, ready to fire.