Cassie P Caribbean PI

Cecil Browne was born in St Vincent and the Grenadines, SVG. He emigrated to England to join his parents in the seventies. He was Head of Maths in a Further Education College for ten years. Passionate about Caribbean music, history, cricket, literature and folklore, his cricket short story, Coming Off the Long Run, was published in So Many Islands, an anthology of stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian and Pacific Oceans, in 2017. He is married, with two daughters.

Books by Cecil Browne

The Moon is Following Me

‘Browne has a gift for creating memorable and appealing characters and for placing them in unlikely situations.’

Maeve Tynan, Wasafiri

‘Browne delights in making his characters swim against the currents of their lives. He couples this with a deft turn of phrase and an eye for detail that makes otherwise commonplace moments sparkle.’

Ann Morgan, St Vincent & the Grenadines: journeys

Feather Your Tingaling

‘Browne’s use of folklore as a key thematic tool laces each story with an element of other-timeliness as well as contemporaneous relevance.’

Natsayi Sithole, Wasafiri

Copyright © 2019 Cecil Browne

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All the events and characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1838597 344

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Thanks to my wife, Denise, daughters

Ama and Sable for their support.

To my sisters Nyoka, Claudette, Liz and Jean for their suggestions, and to my brother, Hilton, for always

spotting the flaws that escape me.

To F Herbert for sound advice, as always.

introduction

This collection introduces, in SVG fiction, the first female private investigator, Cassie Providence.

Contents

1.Cassie Providence

2.Cassie and the Jefferson Robbery

3.Cassie and the Cutlery Set

4.Cassie and the Mason Murder

5.Cassie and the Headmaster’s problem

6.Cassie and the Sad Wife

cassie providence

Some women I know began to fret when they hit the big three-O, but not me. 2014 pelt a kick where it hurt. For in that year Cassie Providence began to make her mark as a private detective. From that time, as one of the top three investigators in St Vincent and the Grenadines – SVG – when I took on your case, you could rely on my training in the police force. And, to be sure, if you look at a woman and only see shape and face, where will you find yourself but in peril?

Five-four, medium-build, I have a heart-shaped face and a headful of soft hair. The satin-black skin, rich eyebrows and almond-shaped eyes? I have to thank our Caribbean history for that. My friends don’t think of me as tough, but they know I can defend myself. In the Thomas case that really set me on the way, two people got physical, and both had to crawl away. I was just climbing out of a steep crab hole when my career took off. A call deep into the night was how the whole thing began.

‘Joel, the phone,’ I grunted that dawn, nudging that ‘vagabond’ man of mine gently in the ribs. ‘Go and check who.’

Night is for sleeping, didn’t the blasted idiot provoking the house phone know that? Unless my father was critical, or my mother – even though the scoundrel ran off when I was seven to search for oil in Trinidad – why would anyone call at that hour? I buried my face in the pillow, Joel might give in and answer.

But no luck. ‘Vagabond’ was in the land of dreams.

‘Get the phone nuh,’ I tried again. ‘Darling. Sweetheart.’

‘Leave it.’ Joel rolled onto his back. ‘It’s probably a wrong number.’

‘This time of the morning?’

‘Zzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzz!’

‘You just wait, see if I don’t catch you.’

I sighed and rolled out of bed, snorting like a sour piglet. ‘Ring off now,’ I called out, ‘stop now and it’s me and you!’

‘Mrs Providence? Cassie Providence?’

‘Yes,’ I mumbled.

‘This is Mr Thomas.’

‘Who?’ I grumbled this time.

‘Big-man Thomas.’

I knew Big-man Thomas. The whole of SVG knew him. There was a time when his smug grin could double the sales of the weekly papers, and tourists could sketch glasses to his eyes in their complimentary magazines. Shopkeeper turned businessman – he used to boast – he had spied a gap in the market, got a bank loan, and got to work.

After years abroad, Vincentians from England, Canada and the US flew back to the sun to thaw out, and to recapture those elements of their youth Nature still permitted. They handed over real Yankee dollars and crisp sterling for the fresh beef, stew pork, river fish, breadfruit, saltfish, mangoes and papaws locals took for granted. Big-man got to know a small fundraising group, and soon his van was eating up the mainland delivering day and night. The shop went, Big-man bought three houses to rent out and made his name and fortune. Business was slowing down now thanks to his gambling, which was on the up. Walk a mile in any direction, and you were bound to hear the rumours that he was in trouble with the bank.

I asked him, ‘What you want, Big-man? Why you waking me up at this hour?’

‘Sorry Mrs Providence,’ he came back, ‘but I have a problem.’

‘What kind of problem?’

‘My daughter Lynette, she didn’t come home last night.’

‘Why you telling me that?’

‘You do a bit of detective work, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I answered swiftly, no point telling him it was six weeks since my last proper case.

‘A little bird chirped your name to me: it said you are an investigator.’

I switched on my brain, hoping he couldn’t hear me rummaging on the table for paper and ink. ‘Let me get my notebook.’

Of course I was an investigator! If I didn’t believe in my work, what was I doing answering the phone at cock-crow?

‘Give me the story, Big-man,’ I said, notebook and pen now at hand. ‘Start from the beginning.’

‘Lynette is an assistant manager in a supermarket in Kingstown,’ he explained after clearing his throat, ‘she started as a cashier and worked her way up. No problems at home, and she’s happy at work. But for some reason me and her mother can’t figure out, she didn’t make it home. My wife is on medication, you have to help us.’

He gave me Lynette’s details – workplace, height, build, car registration, and her work number, his voice choking with emotion.

‘What was she wearing,’ I asked, when he finished the list. ‘What kind of dress, what colour?’

‘I don’t study women’s clothes, Providence,’ Big-man mumbled, as if my question was below a true investigator.

‘Don’t you?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘I thought you used to boast that you were the man for detail,’ I pointed out. ‘Didn’t you go on TV bragging that if you boxed up lobster and plantains for a customer, you made sure the neighbour had mullets and bananas?’

‘You just come by at eight, Providence,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m going to deliver tuna specials for some of my ex-pats, I should be back by then. If you find my daughter, I could put some serious business your way.’

He blew his nose, and I could hear the snivelling as if he was right next to me.

‘Thanks, Big-man,’ I said, ‘you leave everything to me.’

When he rang off I stood there scratching my chin. If someone went missing in SVG it was usually because they wanted to bow out for a while. Pressure at work, an up-and-down relationship, liquor taking over, drugs eating away their brain, that kind of thing. I was intrigued but, best of all, I was happy. For Cassie Providence was on a case, and this one sounded big!

Even now, years later, when I take on a new case, I feel a tingle to go with the butterflies in my stomach. I can’t wait to get going, but I have to fight off the feeling of danger round the next corner, or having to explain to my client that I had come to a dead end. In the police force we called this a ‘five-dollar case’, low priority, easy to suss in a small Caribbean country. But would I be able to solve it on my own?

That morning I couldn’t go back to bed. Four o’clock is the sweetest time to sleep, but also the cruellest to be up. I sat at the window gazing at the Caribbean Sea. Silvery, placid, comforting. The same as the day before, and the one before that. Beautiful, heavenly, a scene to drive you to love. My gaze turned to the bed; ‘Vagabond’ was back in the land of dreams.

Flat on his back, peaceful, the hairs on his stomach and legs soft, I felt like jumping on him. The promise of a case made me feel hollow, anxious, ‘Vagabond’ had the arms to reassure me. But jump on him now, and he would put in a request for the same treatment every morning! So I hauled on a light white cotton dress and went downstairs to my tiny office to begin to plan.

I spent seven years in the SVG police force. I helped to settle family feuds, when they sent me to direct rush hour traffic in Kingstown in the midday sun, I didn’t moan. Leeward, windward, the interior, the Grenadines, wherever they posted me, I was happy to let the residents have a taste of police justice. ‘Mix and mingle’, they taught us during training, gather what you can from every conversation; so, in every village or town, even when off duty, I never forgot that I was a policewoman.

Sergeant Stoute offered me his hand on my first day. ‘Congratulations. Welcome to the force, constable Mulraine.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘But a word of advice. Act fair, do your duty, but don’t go beyond. The hardened criminals who feel they are outside and above the law; the drug dealers and landowners who believe that they run the country with their dirty dollars; the rich lawyers who don’t want to pay a dollar in taxes because they can recite a dozen Latin phrases and dress up in pretty gowns: those are the people to go after.’

Fresh from Police College, who was I to argue?

‘Crime mostly takes care of itself in SVG,’ Sergeant Stoute informed me, ‘don’t get overzealous during an investigation.’

‘But sir,’ I protested, ‘we have to contact every witness to get a full picture so we can lock up the culprits in a case. You commit the crime, you must suffer in a dirty cell on bread and lime juice.’

‘No.’ Stoute patted me on the left shoulder and gave me the kind of reassuring smile I only got from my father. ‘As police we must try not to upset the pattern, or magnify a fly into a lion. Girlfriend chasing boyfriend with a hoe on the way home from their plot of yams; neighbours pelting blows over ownership of a breadfruit tree; a jealous lover lacing a meal with turpentine: why turn a simple quarrel into a criminal offence?’

‘You want us to teach Vincy people to reason, sir?’

‘And to be reasonable. To lift themselves above a dispute; to sit down and talk instead of jumping up and down if you step on their toes.’

‘I suppose I could try, sir.’

Stoute was tall, erect, handsome, with a proud blackness he carried everywhere. I followed his advice, but in my own way. I was my own woman, I had to play it the way I saw it. Those who came at me kicking and punching ended up on the floor, sometimes taking me with them. Bruise for bruise, you had to run with it, as they say. A youth on the way to a dance carrying a weapon went straight to jail, no ifs, no buts, if I was the officer who frisked him.

Van drivers made sure there were no dull days, some fool who could barely write his name was bound to come to the station and threaten the female officer who asked to see his licence. ‘Ask your father who your mother was,’ one idiot said to me, fingering his gold chain and blowing me a kiss. My colleague Neesha Crichton wanted to send him to hospital with a busted lip, but I watched him hard then got out the handcuffs. But no, I decided after a while, the crapaud wasn’t worth the effort. ‘Come back when you get to D in the alphabet,’ I told him, cutting his licence into pieces with my scissors. ‘And don’t let the police catch you driving without your documents.’

We separated schoolgirls squabbling over a mobile phone, my body received so many blows I was sure forty would find me blue from head to toe. A woman rushing her fella in the street in a rage, lashing out with fist and handbag, would ignore the officer trying to keep the peace. I took home insults as well as bruises, but you wouldn’t find me grumbling to my sergeant.

Down the Grenadines the fighting was mainly about land. Prominent people, ‘the elite’, they called themselves. These were the islands tourists came for, they told us at the station, their white sand was weightier than gold. And each man and woman seemed to want a parcel of this precious sand. I remember driving to prevent a brother choking his sister to death over breakfast in Bequia, ‘Give me the deeds!’ he was screeching when we got there. Another five minutes, and I’m sure we would have been dealing with a murder. And it was a murder in Kingstown that gave me a taste for detective work.

My sergeant had lined up a spell with the detective team, the officer leading the murder investigation was his cousin. It was mainly desk work to begin, and meeting after meeting to discuss progress. I listened, but didn’t say much at first. I managed to ease my way in, and soon I was doing the door-to-door enquiries with Sylvia Peppy. When the team returned to the station empty-handed one rainy evening, I caught Inspector De Freitas trying to thump the life out of her desk.

I waited till she was alone, begged to join the team proper, and she agreed. Now we went out at night in teams of women or men, not mixed as before. We were lucky, for night is when people open up in a bar – to women if they could play the part, to men if they had the cash. After sponsoring drinkers beer and malt three nights in a row, each team came back with the same name. The confession came soon after, and without tears. I liked the feel of detective work, family disputes seemed petty now.

Some of the younger officers were after promotion, but Sergeant and Inspector didn’t appeal to me. Longer spells with the detectives in town was what I was after, why chase stripes to weigh down my shoulders? One Friday deep into my service, the sergeant at Chateaubelair, Hilton Corea, called me into his office and shut the door behind me.

Corea was short and muscular, with a soft baby-face which was the brown shade of black our Caribbean history is always toying with. The talk was that he had joined up thinking the police force was one branch up from Scouts, but managed to disarm a knifeman on the journey home on his first day. He was brave and strong and liked action. Mention a fight, and he was flexing his staff and revving up his police motorbike to make an arrest.

‘Mulraine,’ Corea sang out my name that Friday, as though he was about to proposition me.

‘Yes, sergeant,’ I answered shyly, taking the chair opposite him he forgot to offer me.

‘I have good news for you.’

I screwed up my face. One of his women had recently left him, and I knew he was putting the word about the station that he had a ‘vacancy’.

‘Yes sergeant?’ I repeated, but this time adding a frown.

‘I’m recommending you for a special unit for night operations. I think you’re ready to move up.’

My hair started to itch, I was sure I could smell burning.

‘Me sergeant?’ I almost cried out.

‘Yes Mulraine. Remember the six weeks you spent with the detective team in Kingstown?’

‘Two months, sergeant.’

‘No matter. Inspector De Freitas said you have the potential for detective work, and that Carib woman has a good police nose. It’s time to start climbing the ladder.’

I wondered if he was confusing me with another Officer Mulraine in the leeward area. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, ‘but when you said night work, you mean going after gangs deep into the mountains?’

Sergeant Corea took a sip of his cold beer. ‘That’s a possibility, yes.’

‘And taking on the traffickers who live fast, and expect to perish round every blind corner?’

Another sip. ‘With the elite squad you must be ready to use your training to the full, yes.’

‘Then thank you but no, Sergeant Corea: the special unit not for Cassie Mulraine. I put in to train as a detective, what happened to my application?’

‘I’ll check.’

Five months later, when Corea showed me my name on his list again, I resigned on the spot. The mountain people crammed their three-score and ten years into twenty-two, I was happy to