Devil Ship Series: Books 1 to 3 Bundle

558 pages

Chapter 3: Lies and Visions

“I am sorry,” said Laplace. “I had hoped to have better news. But since the… since Mr. Hobart’s death, things have become very difficult.”

Joe and Sara were sitting with Laplace in the living room. Keri had tactfully dragged Ryan away for a scuba dive on the reef. The islander was about forty, slightly paunchy, with a shaven head. He was very well-dressed in a lightweight suit and fancy loafers. His watch looked expensive, but Sara thought it might have been a knock-off.

She thought the manager was handsome, albeit in a smooth kind of way. In other circumstances, she could imagine him being quite charming. But not at the moment. Now, Laplace looked sweaty and evasive under direct questioning.

“Every time I contacted you from the States,” Joe was saying, struggling to keep an even tone, “you said things were going well. Or at least okay. When I came over for a couple of days you made out like there were no major issues, like the lack of progress was entirely normal and the work was about to speed up. Now, we find the resort is weeks behind schedule, and a lot of basic stuff—like plumbing—has barely gotten started. I see heaps of pipes and half-built walls where there should be luxury tourist accommodation. Philippe, why all the bullshit?”

Laplace held up his hands in a defensive gesture.

“Before he—before his accident, Mr. Hobart told me to tell the other investors—your good selves, of course—that things were on course. I… I admit that until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I could turn it around, but I underestimated the problem.”

“Is this problem something to do to with les boucaniers?” asked Sara.

Laplace looked startled and was at a loss for words. Sara was irritated but still wanted to think the best of the man, despite his failure. Laplace was certainly not a very good liar. They might be dealing with a weak man, she decided, not a slick con artist with an answer to everything. Either way, though, the situation was bad.

“We’ll take that silence as a yes,” Joe said, his annoyance with the site manager now becoming more obvious. “Just tell us what happened, Philippe, for God’s sake. Did you do something to offend those people?”

Laplace looked down at the coffee on the table in front of him. He sighed and Sara felt, for a moment, that he might be about to come clean. But she wasn’t sure. She had worked in real estate for years and had learned to read people fairly well. Laplace seemed devious as well as weak, fundamentally untrustworthy beneath his superficial likeability.

“Yes,” said the manager, “les boucaniers, they did make a fuss. This cove, the reef, they see it as part of their heritage, you know? There was some vandalism, sabotage. Some workers left because they felt threatened. At first, I just employed security guards at night to safeguard the machinery when nobody was working here, but then the guards—they quit, either formally or they just stopped coming. Local people don’t like to antagonize les boucaniers. Then I… I tried to make a deal with them.”

It took Sara a moment to grasp what he meant.

“You paid them?” she said, aghast. “You let them blackmail you? That’s never smart. They’ll just keep coming back for more.”

Laplace nodded, and Sara saw an inadequate man forced to confront his failure. Joe, she could see, was furious again, and she put a hand on his arm, felt the tension.

“Did you skim money that should have been paid to the workers?” she asked. “Or for building materials? I’m guessing you didn’t dip into your own pocket.”

Laplace nodded, eyes downcast.

“How much?” Joe snapped. “How much of our goddamn money did you pay those people?”

“Three thousand dollars—I mean East Caribbean dollars.”

After a quick mental calculation, Sara felt some relief. It was not so bad as the raw figure sounded.

“That’s over a thousand dollars American,” she said. “Too much, especially since they’re still harassing us. And why didn’t you simply come and tell us this straightaway?”

Laplace glanced sideways, then, out of the living room window, then looked straight at Sara. She recognized the direct stare as a standard liar’s tactic, a way of asserting ‘I’m an honest man who just made a mistake, this is the real me.’

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