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He offered his guests a choice of Dom Perignon or Blue Mountain coffee. They chose coffee and sat down.
Desmond Hannah asked the same questions about the hour of five P.M. the previous Tuesday evening. The reply was the same.
“Addressing an enthusiastic crowd of well over a hundred people outside the Anglican church in Parliament Square, Mr. Hannah. At five o’clock I was just finishing my address. From there I drove straight back here.”
“And your ... entourage?” asked Hannah, borrowing Missy Coltrane’s word to describe the election campaign team in their bright shirts.
“All with me, to a man,” said Johnson. He waved a hand, and one of the bright-shirts topped up the coffee. McCready wondered why he had no local serving staff inside the house, although he would have Barclayan gardeners. Despite the subdued light inside the verandah, the bright-shirts never removed their wraparound dark glasses.
From Hannah’s point of view, the interlude was pleasant but fruitless. He had already been told by Chief Inspector Jones that the prosperity candidate had been on Parliament Square when the shots were fired at Government House. The Inspector himself had been on the steps of his own police station on the square, surveying the scene. He rose to leave.
“Do you have another public address scheduled for today?” asked Dillon.
“Yes, indeed. At two, on Parliament Square.”
“You were there yesterday at three. There was a disturbance, I believe.”
Marcus Johnson was a much smoother operator than Livingstone. No hint of temper. He shrugged.
“The Reverend Drake shouted some rude words. No matter. I had finished my speech. Poor Drake—well intentioned, no doubt, but foolish. He wishes the Barclays to remain in the last century. But progress must come, Mr. Dillon, and with it prosperity. I have the most substantial development plans in mind for our dear Barclays.”
McCready nodded. Tourism, he thought, gambling, industry, pollution, a little prostitution—and what else?
“And now, if you will forgive me, I have a speech to prepare.”
They were shown out, and they drove back to Government House.
“Thank you for your hospitality,” said Dillon as he climbed out. “Meeting the candidates was most instructive. I wonder where Johnson made all that money in the years he was away.”
“No idea,” said Hannah. “He’s listed as a businessman. Do you want Oscar to run you back to the Quarter Deck?”
“No, thank you. I’ll stroll.”
In the bar the press corps was working its way through the beer supply. It was eleven o’clock. They were getting bored. Two full days had elapsed since they had been summoned to Heathrow to scramble to the Caribbean and cover a murder inquiry. All the previous day, Thursday, they had filmed what they could and interviewed whom they could. Pickings had been slim: a nice shot of the Governor coming out of the ice house from his bed between the fish; some long shots of Parker on his hands and knees in the Governor’s garden; the dead Governor departing in a bag for Nassau; Parker’s little gem about finding a single bullet. But nothing like a good, hard piece of news.
McCready mingled with them for the first time. No one asked who he was.
“Horatio Livingstone is speaking on the dock at twelve,” he said. “Could be interesting.”
They were suddenly alert. “Why?” asked someone.
McCready shrugged. “There was some savage heckling here on the square yesterday,” he said. “You were at the airstrip.”
They brightened up. A nice little riot would be the thing—failing that, some good heckling. The reporters began to run some imaginary headlines through their minds. “Election Violence Sweeps Sunshine Isle”—a couple of punches would justify that. Or if Livingstone got a hostile reception, “Paradise Vetoes Socialism.”
The trouble was that so far, the population seemed to have no interest at all in the prospect of freedom from the Empire. Two news teams that had tried to put together a documentary on local reaction to independence had not been able to secure a single interviewee who would talk. People just walked away when the cameras, microphones, and notepads came out. Still, they picked up their gear and sauntered toward the docks.
McCready took time to make a single call to the British Consulate in Miami from the portable phone he kept in the attaché case under his bed. He asked for a seven-seater charter plane to land on Sunshine at four P.M. It was a long shot, but he hoped it would work.
Livingstone’s cavalcade arrived from Shantytown at a quarter to twelve. One aide boomed through a megaphone, “Come and hear Horatio Livingstone, the people’s candidate.” Others erected two trestles and a stout plank to lift the people’s candidate above the people.
At noon, Horatio Livingstone hoisted his bulk up the steps to the makeshift platform. He spoke into a megaphone on a stem in front of him, held up by one of the safari suits. Four TV cameras had secured elevated positions around the meeting, from which they could cover the candidate or, hopefully, the hecklers and the fighting.
The BSB cameraman had borrowed the cabin roof of the Gulf Lady. To back up his TV camera, he had a Nikon camera with a telephoto lens slung across his back. The reporter, Sabrina Tennant, stood beside him.
McCready climbed up to join them. “Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” said Sabrina Tennant. She took no notice of him.
