yards; cleared it loud enough to be heard over the sound of the lapping small waves.
Lawrence turned around. Tears were in his eyes, but he did not blink or change the muscles of his face. He was a child-man accepting the agonies of a very personal torment.
'What happened?' asked McAuliff softly, walking up to the shirtless boy-giant.
'I should have listened to you, mon. Not to him. He was wrong, mon.'
'Tell me what happened,' repeated Alex.
'Barak is dead. I did what he ordered me to do and he is dead. I listened to him and he is dead, mon.'
'He knew the risk; he had to take it. I think he was probably right.'
'No... He was wrong because he is dead. That makes him wrong, mon.'
'Floyd's gone... Barak. Who is there now?'
Lawrence's eyes bore into McAuliffs; they were red from silent weeping, and beyond the pride and summoned strength, there was the anguish of a child. And the pleading of a boy. 'You and me, mon. There is no one else... You will help me, mon?'
Alex returned the rebel's stare; he did not speak.
Welcome to the seat of revolution, McAuliff thought to himself.
Chapter Twenty-One
TWENTY ONE
The Trelawny police made Floyd's identification at 7.02 in the morning. The delay was caused by the lack of any print facilities in Falmouth and the further lack of cooperation on the part of several dozen residents who were systematically routed from their beds during the night to observe the corpse. The captain was convinced that any number of them recognized the bullet-pierced body, but it was not until two minutes past seven when one old man - a gardener from Carrick Foyle - had reacted sufficiently to the face of the bloody mess on the table for the captain to decide to apply sterner methods. He held a lighted cigarette millimetres in front of the old man's left eye, which he stretched open with his free hand. He told the trembling black that he would burn the gelatine of his eyeball unless he told the. truth.
The ancient gardener screamed and told the truth. The man who was the corpse on the table had worked for Walter Piersall. His name was Floyd Cotter.
The captain then telephoned several parish precincts for further information on one Cotter, Floyd. There was nothing; they had never heard of him. But the captain had persisted; Kingston's interest in Dr Walter Piersall, before and after his death, was all-inclusive. Even to the point of around-the-clock patrols at the house on the hill in Carrick Foyle. The captain did not know why; it was not his province to question, much less analyse, Kingston's commands. That they were was enough. Whatever the motives that resulted in the harassment of the white scholar before his death, and the continued concern about his residence after, was Kingston's bailiwick, not his. He simply followed orders. He followed them well, even enthusiastically. That was why he was the prefect captain of the parish police in Falmouth.
And that was why he kept making telephone calls about one Floyd Cotter, deceased, whose corpse lay on the table and whose blood would not stop oozing out of the punctures on his face and in his chest and stomach and legs; blood that dried on the pages of The Gleamer, hastily scattered about the floor.
At five minutes to eight, as the captain was about to lift the receiver off its base and call the precinct in Sherwood Content, the telephone rang. It was his counterpart in Puerto Seco, near Discovery Bay, whom he had contacted twenty minutes ago. The man said that after their conversation, he had talked with his deputies on the early shift. One of the men reported that there was a Floyd with a survey team, headed by an American named McAuliff, that had begun work about ten days ago on the shoreline. The survey had hired a carrier crew out of Ocho Rios. The Government Employment Office had been involved.
The captain then woke up the director of the GEO in Ochee. The man was thoroughly awake by the time he got on the line, because he had no telephone and consequently had had to leave his house and walk to a Johnny Canoe store, where he - and most of the neighbourhood - took calls. The employment chief recalled that among the crewmen hired by the American named McAuliff, there had been a Floyd, but he did not remember the last name. This Floyd had simply shown up with